Because whenever I’m dumb enough to really stop and think about the foreseeable future, and how little hope there actually is, knowing that none of the dominant political powers are going to improve or change anything, I unsurprisingly become pretty deeply depressed.
I see why people choose not to think about it at all.
Being “apolitical” is just tacit support for the status quo
Yeah on :citations-needed: they described being apolitical as a form of conservatism and that stuck with me
Spoke with a self-proclaimed apolitical guy once, middle-aged white guy who makes six figures and has plenty of hobbies. He had good opinions about endless wars, social welfare, and the criminal justice system. And he hated politicians just as much as any revolutionary would. However, he thought that the solution to America’s problems is generational change and electoralism.
Apolitical people don’t care about politics because they don’t need to. They can hate the system as much as anyone, but they recognize that the system benefits them and therefore don’t demand a new system.
I usually meet two types of apolitical people. Ones that think the capitalist system is working for them just fine so there’s no need to get invested in any politics. And ones that the system has beaten down so heavily that they see no way out and hence think everything is pointless.
I think the bleak outlook you get from making a rational analysis of material reality is also part of the reason why the right are doing so well. They offer comforting fantasies and flattering lies that makes you feel better about yourself.
If you believe you can blame everything on some ethnic minority or lazy poors or whatever it makes the world much more easy and manageable and it doesn’t make any demands of you.
Even more grim are the faction of the right that have a cold hearted and clear eyed view of reality. But instead of concluding that we need to work together to solve our problems, they conclude that the only way forward is to genocide the majority of the earth’s population, so that a small racial elect can have the planet to themselves.
People know they are being fucked over, that’s the one thing they are certain about. But alienation and propaganda have made it incredibly hard for people to find paths leftward. Because the capitalists have so severely muddied the waters, these people don’t know who to trust and end up rejecting any recognizable attempts at political outreach for fear of being manipulated. The vast majority of leftist agitation is recognizably political, so that’s ruled out. Instead, they become manipulated by the more subtle and ubiquitous forms of propaganda that are all liberal in nature. The result is this group of people who have absorbed and internalized the liberal propaganda but nevertheless still believe they are apolitical.
If we want to make inroads with this category of apolitical people, we need to actually improve their lives. We need to build support systems poor people can rely on that aren’t subservient to capitalist power. That’s the way we show them we’ll actually fight for them when push comes to shove unlike the liberals or chuds.
