Re:Remembering the burglary that broke Cointelpro
by scottmcf on Thursday March 14, 2019 @08:47AM
(#19388710)
I've wrestled with this. The only solution I've found to balance out these two conflicting ideas (justifiable outrage vs living my life) is to run for office myself.
Re:Remembering the burglary that broke Cointelpro
by mindslight on Thursday March 14, 2019 @10:53AM
(#19389726)
I think there's a middle ground where you don't have to stop paying attention, yet you also don't have to be outraged by every new report, even despite it being outrageous.
But the pitfall you need to keep aware of is the cognitive dissonance that causes people to flip and start supporting the system. When "pulling back", it is important to not end up being taken in by simplistic messages that actually transmute you into an enabler. For example each political party preaches their own flavor of legitimate criticism to gather support, but then directs that energy at the easy target of the "other" team instead of ever addressing deep seated corruption.
Re:Remembering the burglary that broke Cointelpro
by Spooky23 on Thursday March 14, 2019 @09:19AM
(#19388935)
It’s a cycle — we were grappling with the same issues in 1919 and 1819, as technology and governance changed the structure of society.
The reflex action to this form of gilded age will be significant and hopefully peaceful.
Re:Remembering the burglary that broke Cointelpro
by harmful_stereo on Thursday March 14, 2019 @04:51PM
(#19393576)
Reverse shadenfreude,maybe? The notion that you have been denied the opportunity to "live morally or joyfully" by the condition of misery in the world; the inability to enjoy your own selfishness or competitiveness enough to compensate.
But yeah, what you said. "This, times a million," as my dear heart would say to me.
I don’t mean this to sound dismissive at all. It is seriously an incredibly difficult moral and philosophical question as I see it.
Burning yourself out with constant (justified) rage obviously seems foolish: you’re not likely to accomplish anything except frittering away your life and youth and ending up bitter with nothing to show for it.
Meanwhile, it genuinely does not seem possible to make any incremental improvement to the world in terms of corruption and abuse of power without being pedantically hypervigilant and extreme to an alienating degree that rejects many comforts of basic life and ignores things like career or family development in favor of nearly constant activism.
The problems are so sprawling and complex that average, even above average, people have no hope at all of sustaining justified outrage and channeling it into productive action. So naturally it’s much easier for most people to slide into narrowly focusing on their own life / family / career / hobbies / community, and rationalizing away any feeling that they might have had an intrinsic moral duty to engage sustained, unyielding outrage even at their own expense until massive scale changes are effected or they literally die trying to bring about such changes.
I’m neither excusing anyone nor judging anyone in this observation. Just pointing out what feels like a deep, philosphically intractable trade-off at the heart of it.