So, ive been thinking about how my trauma effects my politics. This may shock some of you, but a lot of my radicalizing experiences were pretty fucking traumatizing. Resistance is part of how i cope, how i keep from killing myself, how i get up in the morning after all the shit I’ve survived. I am under no illusions that I am emotionally healthy.
But that doesn’t just go one direction. How do we define and explore the pathology of boot licking, of continued obedience, of feeling perfectly fine and like it’s ‘just another day and wow yeah something scary must be on if the US marines are deployed down the street, i hope they get the bad guys soon!’?
Because this is a dangerous delusion. It is blatantly and violently counterfactual. So what the fuck? Pathologically stable attachment? Hypersucceotability to delusion?
How do we figure out what a healthy person and healthy context for them to exist in would even fucking look like?
I don’t just want to call the pathologically compliant names here¹. I want to figure out what breaks a person like this so we can fucking fix it. I want theories with actual utility in something adjacent to the situationist tradition.
¹’boot licker’ is perfectly suitable and requires no further theorizing. Not that I don’t also want to call them that.
More seriously though, cognitive behavioural theory argues that thoughts, feelings, and behaviours reinforce one another. You may have heard the term “cognitive dissonance” when it had its time in the limelight as the buzzword du jour; that’s the discomfort that happens when two of those things aren’t in alignment. Changing behaviour is hard, so most folks will naturally take the path of least resistance and just begin to believe differently.
We exist in an alienating system that requires unnatural behaviour in order to survive it (e.g., working a meaningless job for a wage). This is where we get the “you claim to hate capitalism, yet you participate in it- curious…” bullshit. It comes from people who can’t stand that dissonance and so have defaulted to convincing themselves that capitalism must be good. The majority of people, however, don’t even get that far. Even the idea of changing one’s behaviour - especially behaviours practically required to survive an inherently fucked system - is off-putting. “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
Like others described, it’s a combination of factors like learned helplessness, self-delusion, willful ignorance, and ofc the systems of propaganda/indoctrination that reinforce it. And of course, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Yet the folks responsible for defining pathology are entrenched in the system(s) responsible in the first place.
Side note, psychopathology is largely a weapon wielded against the proletariat, and I think we should consider not legitimizing the tools of our oppressors