Dusting off this old Tumblr for probably the most important thing I've written to date:
The thesis statement of the political "left" is thus:
All human beings have innate worth and value beyond human measure, and each and every one is by virtue of their existence is deserving of life, love, and happiness.
No exceptions.
What fuels one's push to the "right" is finding exceptions to the above. The more exceptions one determines there to be, the further to the "right" they go, and once you choose to find exceptions, it becomes easier to find more exceptions.
This is why it is FAR easier to slide down the far-Right rabbit hole than it is to climb out of it. It is much simpler to find new exceptions than it is to reconsider old ones, especially when one considers the power that determining these exceptions give someone.
Under the "left" paradigm, no human being is more or less important than any other. As one slides to the Right, the more people and groups one deems themselves better than, they forge a power dynamic is created between themselves and everyone they believe themselves to be better than - gaining power at their expense.
And power is its own reward.
This is why I claim that there is no "center", politically speaking. In fact, seeing politics as a "line" with a "center" under this paradigm implies an equilibrium point exists at which there are an ideal number of human beings that are determined to not be worthy of love, life, or happiness.
A more accurate representation of this political paradigm is a ray with the terminal point at universal life, love, and happiness, and extending outward as the number of exceptions to the universal accumulate.
And the limit as the ray extends to infinity is, of course, fascism.
Can people who have started to choose exceptions be saved before they get too far gone? Maybe, but in order for that to happen, they need to acknowledge that they were wrong to make exceptions in the first place. And the more exceptions made, the more power they gain from those exceptions, and as a result, they are less willing to abandon those exceptions, because it weakens them.
Power is its own reward
The problem is, too many people are trying to convert the inconvertible - those who have built a personal power identity from all those they have dehumanized - and doing little to nothing to help those who are more likely to have their course corrected.
"Can't they save themselves?" you may ask. Maybe, but they have to want to break free, and - as stated - after a certain point, they won't want to.
On second thought, maybe a ray isn't the most accurate image of this phenomenon after all. Perhaps a more accurate image is an exponential graph: one that starts off at a reasonable level, then, after a certain inflection point, takes off to infinity and beyond.
If that's the case, then perhaps self-described "centrism" is that inflection point: too far gone to be saved, but not yet exploding to full-on fascism.
Emphasis on "yet".
They have determined their equilibrium point of human beings that should be dehumanized - the "center" described above. It wouldn't take much to flip them to full-on fascism. Hell, we see it every day: so called "centrists" who embrace fascism because "a lefty was mean to me". It should be apparent by now that it was never that huge a step to begin with.
Here's the point: There are people who are fully capable of understanding and undoing the programming that created unconscious exceptions (and some conscious ones) and be brought back to the Idea of Universal Love, and people who are not. Simple as that. There seems to be a lot more effort put on changing the hearts of those who do not than we should. Why we're putting ANY effort into people who are aggressively unwilling to see other human beings as anything other than fodder for their benefit is beyond me.
The lack of effort toward pulling those who have not yet gone too far back from the brink is disheartening and maddening, but I understand why.
It's helpful to recognize that by and large, these people are the "forced into apathy to survive" group I talked about in an earlier Twitter thread. The people that engage on social media are almost exclusively members of the other two groups: those who aggressively care about others, and those who aggressively exploit others.
We don't engage the third group because they don't engage. They're just trying to survive.
Any path to save society has to start with ensuring the means of existence, because every path to exploiting society starts with withholding the means of existence.
The exploiters love it when the bulk of society is too beat down to engage it.
At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, the very heart and soul of humanity - what it even means to be human at all - is at stake here.
It is pointless to recruit people to rescue humanity from its own devastation from the ranks of those who would sell out humanity for a taste of power.
I've said this before, and I'll say it until I can't any more: we have to love our fellow human beings. HAVE to. It's the only way out of this.
Love is the answer.
