this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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Sure, but I don't care. Should I?
Yes. You should care when someone dehumanizes you. It's the first step that goes towards rounding you and people like you up. But maybe you like the idea of being put in a death camp?
You're right, of course. I do not agree with the message, nor am I even completely indifferent to it - but at the same time, I find it difficult to care how they or most other organizations express themselves. I suppose it is at least partially a consequence of growing up feeling alienated from society, or more literally an alien to society; I am just too detached to identify with any of this enough to feel anything here. Whether this is another divisive PETA ad that missed its mark, or an unusually clever campaign against PETA ... whatever.
Even politics in general, putting energy into making our communities and consequently our lives better, what could be more important? But does it matter how strongly I feel about a given issue, when the entire system - whether by design or wonderful, serendipitous emergence - is a fucking sham? There is no shortage of the type of selfish behaviour on the individual (i.e. tangible) level to keep it fed and elevate us to the next dimension of cultural horror.
I suppose this might be becoming cliche by now (and I don't know if this is progress?), but I think it is pretty clear that what we've been calling 'democracy' is a symptom; a sham borne out of, sustaining, and masking some rather fundamental deficiencies. Our ability to communicate breaks down almost completely the moment we introduce even superficial and theoretically inconsequential differences: how the fuck can we ever hope to tackle something like the illusory gains of selfishness?
Essentially, I've compartmentalized where I could, and let go where I couldn't. Day to day I don't feel like I have given up, but I suppose to some degree I probably have. And without Camus, or Sartre, or Dostoevsky, I'm really not sure where I'd be. I've always just accepted this for myself, but... if I had to choose between giving my children hope, or acceptance? I mean, don't get me wrong, I want them to have both, but I know one will serve them well.
I do care deeply about people (and animals, of course), and do not want to contribute to the suffering of either - so thank you for reminding me it is all connected. I probably needed that. I need to be mindful that even though I am neither hurt by nor influenced by others' idiotic expressions of insecurity, a lot of people actually do buy into these things, and given our tendency toward majoritarian ideational validation, well...
I do understand where you're coming from and it does make sense to want to compartmentalize on this sort of thing. I react strongly to it when I see it not only because there are people in my family who are neurodivergent (I mentioned my father and brother elsewhere in the thread, but they are not the only ones), but because I come from a traditionally marginalized and dehumanized minority that did end up being put in death camps. And we're seeing so many calls to dehumanize marginalized populations as it is.
They didn't have the understanding of neurodivergence in Nazi Germany that we do now, but I guarantee you that they would have put every non-neurotypical person in a camp if they could have done so along with all the other people they determined to be mentally unfit.
So I don't mean to sound harsh when replying to you. It just scares me to see people from a specific group, be it an ethnic group, a sexual identity, or a group of people united by the consequence having their minds work differently from the "norm," being depicted like there is something wrong with them when there's nothing wrong with them.