I keep reading these blog posts by intelligent people who seem to have boundless energy for the analysis of topics both mundane and profound, and they are all always very meta. God’s eye view of university entrance criteria. God’s eye view of social media. God’s eye view of the correspondence of Raymond Chandler. And it’s all always to the purpose of arguing the (in)validity of some socio-theoretical perspective or assertion about whatever-it-happens-to-be. Deciding what people ought to do and how the world ought to work. Some lady on the internet. She gets to decide. Some dude.
But the more meta you get, the more systems-level your perspective, the less directly involved you are in whatever you’re analysing. And this, i suppose, is the point, to step back and take an actual look at what you’re doing and why. A valuable practice, certainly. But also, if you look at the most serious humanity-scale problems in the world, every single one of them (climate change, Ukraine, twitter, fascism, for example) are systems-level problems created by people either trying to create systems-level solutions, or to milk/manipulate the system for their own ends.
Abstraction is the root of all duderheaded decisions. Because the person smart enough to think abstractly usually isn’t smart enough to realise that being able to think abstractly doesn’t mean you actually know how things work, and it sure as shit doesn’t mean you know how to solve a problem practically.
I sound like a grumpy old cynic, but political idealism and utopianism is smart people intellectually justifying being naive, selfish, stupid, and hedonistic.
There can never be a perfect society, and the the reason is simple: because. There will never be a world in which everyone always makes the right decision, or in which there are no selfish, manipulative assholes who try to fuck things up for everybody. The nicer you are, the easier a time the asshole has of getting what (s)he wants. Why? Because think about it.
Even the most nuanced intellectual approach to things (ie. actually not utiopian) is still escapism. It’s virtue signalling of the worst kind. Because writing blog posts (and academic papers!) takes an immense amount of work, and so it feels like you’re doing something about the problem. But you’re not.
Maybe someone will read what you wrote and their thinking and actions will be changed by it. And yes, it might be contributing to the Zeitgeist and the groundswell of sentiment that pushes people to act in one way or another. But it’s still a convenient way for the blogger themselves to hit POST on their wordpress site and put their feet up with the feeling job done, world saved—while the plugins they’ve installed on said site automatically propagate the post across all of the social media sites they probably profess to loathe. They thus directly and concretely and practically support a system-level tool that is genuinely fucking up society.
Do something, or don’t. Wax on, wax off. Write all the fucking sociology papers you fucking want. There is no practical problem that thinking alone can solve, but we have been trained to believe the opposite. When i put my conspiracy hat on the reason for this is obvious: because thinking-type people never do anything.
The kind of person who thinks before they act is the kind of person who hesitates and considers whether capitalism might not be so bad after all.
That’s pretty great if you’re a dickhead doing-person who feels like fucking everybody over for a big old pile of money and all the power you could ever dream of. Set up the marxists vs. the libertarians and giggle all the way to the bank when you add 50% to the price of their toilet paper and they don’t notice because they’re arguing arguing arguing over economic theory.
Irony, na?