I hope fatalism is the right word for it. I guess it could be called defeatism, acceptance, arguments from nature whatever.
Hoo boy I hope this doesn’t come across as unintelligible ranting but it’s a huge pet peeve of mine and I hardly ever see it addressed.
Nothing is more anti-life, anti-humanity and anti progress than accepting ‘the way things are’.
This might be a hot take and might even be considered by most to be an unhealthy opinion, but accepting things ‘you can’t change’ is defeatist to me, because how do you even know you can’t change something? You’re not god, you don’t know for sure. There are so many things we thought were an unchangable fact of life that did, in fact, get changed. Yes I understand that stressing about something that doesn’t have an immediate solution right now is not going to do your mental health any favors, but it doesn’t mean solutions aren’t worth pursuing. This type of nihilist fatalism isn’t just depressing, it’s dangerous. It’s the type of attitude that gets millions killed by desease because illness is just a part of life so why eliminate polio?
Like why even bother inventing shoes if foot pain is inevitable, right? Pathetic. Invent shoes, you dweeb. Nothing sadder than seeing this species resign itself to premature extinction.
A related idea is the conviction that the world works according to a strict determinism, that we have a large enough historical sample size to make definite and wide-ranging proofs about potential of various dynamics in history, that there is no more theory to be developed, amd that all possibilities have already been played out.
A lot of leftists fall victim to this thinking.
I’m early on in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but it talks about how our education system nurtures this kind of fatalistic helplessness.
Attempting to summarize:
Our “banking” system of education views students as simply receiving and memorizing information about the world as it is. This alienates them from their ability to actively shape the world, by treating it as something to simply be observed.
This system serves the oppressing class by limiting the imagination to just what exists in the current status quo.
Great book so far - this bit specifically is in chapter 2
Yeah… but what about femme fatalism
Shit I might have to consider this…
I agree with you. As a long time attendee of twelve step meetings, the Serenity Prayer is often used to justify the very thing you’re talking about:
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference.
The last line there is the key. I live in bum fuck nowhere. Nearly everyone around me is a fascist loving boot licker, or too poor to care. I spend most of my time with those people, because if I can change just one mind on one subject, through kindness and compassion, then there might be hope for us all.
I’ve successfully turned my former Gadsden flag wearing libertarian evangelical maintenance man neighbor into a union steward. If that’s not change, I don’t know what is.
I’ve successfully turned my former Gadsden flag wearing libertarian evangelical maintenance man neighbor into a union steward.
That’s damn impressive
Thanks. It literally took YEARS. After a couple years of “grooming” so-to-speak, I started reading excerpts from Engels and Marx to him, but changed a few words around so as not to raise his hackles. Never told him what exactly I was reading — sometimes I’d lie and say it was a blog or substack I liked. One day I finally dropped that, the excerpt which he had so enthusiastically agreed with, was indeed from Marx. He’s still mad at me for that lol. “YOU TRICKED ME!!! Goldangit you TRICKED ME!”
He’s not a ML by any stretch, and unfortunately he has real issues with queer folk… but we’re working on it. Love that man to bits, in spite of his more despicable and lamentable characteristics. But I’m one of those goofballs that really believes in the power of radical love.
no lie, that’s inspiring. At a young age I gave up on almost everyone from my part of the bum-fuck-nowhere woods. I know what you mean about how fascistic they can be. But I sometimes think about what progress, even if little, there could have been if I had tried even just a little bit every day or week with the people I loved over the many years. I like how you frame it as an act of love. It really is. I took the “easy way” of just giving up early on most, but then nothing stops the cycle. And you’re left lonelier. Thanks for sharing.
The inability to conceive of a better world than the one we live in, or the prospect of things getting better is reactionary thinking. If Nothing Is To Be Done, then you can just watch everything burn around you and say “See? I told you it couldn’t get better!” There’s a certain comfort to that certainty, and a certain safety, but it’s self-defeating. It’s the logic of the abuser, of the oppressor. It was always like this, it must always be like this.
Was it always like this? No, of course not. And it won’t always be like this. There are plenty of things that I am ultimately powerless to change. Who gives a shit? I do what I can. To concede this to your oppressors is to become one yourself. I’ve seen this dynamic play out over and over and over again and it never ends well for the fatalists, at least not from the outside looking in. But, again: the most important thing becomes that certainty in what is otherwise an unstable and unpredictable world.
I have more thoughts on this, maybe I expand on them later.
Ultimately it lands in a rather full bin of ‘thought killing cliches’.
There is a whole host of Serious Pragmatist writers who insist that any effort to change the world for the better can only end in chaos and bloodshed. In fact, trying to improve the world is bad because it is . . . uh . . . colonialist against the future:
Hiding in the idea of utopia, however, was the dangerous prospect that struggles for the future might be enlisted to justify violence in the present, while those who did not share the revolutionaries’ political convictions were to be condemned as counterrevolutionary. “By opening up the future as a space to be colonized by a just society,” Edelstein writes, “the modern doctrinaires of progress encouraged their followers to value the world to come so highly that they were willing to accept the temporary suspension of democratic beliefs.”
. . .
Like many other recent critics of progress, Edelstein seems to believe that the idea itself is irredeemably tainted because it has too often served as a warrant for imperialist atrocity. But this verdict makes little sense. If atrocity is bad, then we should strive for its elimination, and yet bringing it to an end would surely count as an improvement. Adorno once tried to compress this argument into a single aphorism: “Progress occurs where it ends.” Yes, progress is of course an ideology—but it is not only an ideology, or we could not yearn for a world better than it currently is.
It’s what happens when you grow up surrounded by media with “The Swerve” and internalise it and apply it to real life: https://redsails.org/the-swerve/
Base informs superstructure or something.
I was going to blame Francois Furet but for the average conversation this is definitely it.
That’s true, a lot of PolSci libs love justifying their bullshit with “this fancypants liberal academic said it, not Batman, so you know it must be true.”
I wholeheartedly agree with you. People in my personal life have quite often tried to drag me into this way of thinking. I would rather die than be this way. It’s like learned helplessness, or sticking your head in the sand. I recall reading the experiences of Holocaust survivors and some of them described this way of thinking being prevalent amongst their Jewish comrades throughout the rise of the Nazis.
Something I’ve noticed is some people really don’t like it when you deny this fatalist thinking and fight against it. It’s a phenomenon I don’t understand but have experienced.
It’s a phenomenon I don’t understand but have experienced.
Because fighting back against it shows that it isn’t the only thing to do, and in turn, shows that the problems fatalism declares “impossible” can also be fought back against. So someone who has resigned themselves to accepting shitty things “because there is no alternative” doesn’t want to feel like they’ve wasted their life doing nothing.
sticking your head in the sand
That’s funny, usually I get the opposite. People telling me I look at climate news and studies too much and I need to turn it off more. Embrace ignorance. Which is not a terrible idea sometimes but I do find this accusation funny.
I believe alienation from struggle leads to learned helplessness.
Fatalists believe there’s nothing that can be done because everyone doing anything lives outside the imperial core. So, “the way things are” is rapidly changing, but only in places where they don’t think to look due to chauvinism and imperialist propaganda.
Once you can identify with the struggle in Iran against Zionist aggression or identify with Chinese social progress, the fatalism fades.
Do you think a lot of people are going through a sort of grief, realizing that not only is the US empire falling, but that it was run by the worst kind of people?
I’m not who you asked but i certainly think so. I’ve seen a lot of relapses into liberalism lately. And just a bunch of other shit from people I know who are better then that. I think there are people who didnt do a full interal house cleaning (mentally speaking) and are having to deal with that now.
I think people are so alienated from the global anti-imperialist struggle that they’re going to be very slow to wake up to the fact that the empire is in decline. On the other hand, I think they’ve always known it was run by the worst kind of people, but “it is what it is” and their learned helplessness allowed them to cope with being ruled by monsters.
“Those who are most in need of security are happiest in positions to which they cannot admit any alternative; they identify this helplessness, or impossibility of being, doing, or experiencing otherwise, with contact with reality. It is not reality as independent of themselves, or as truth in itself, which they desire. It is reality as stability of their experience that is important to them. If the world-flux becomes too strong, such persons prefer stability to independent reality. Stereotyping is a defense of this kind against what is perceived as the uncontrollable dynamism of the world. When all experiences have been sufficiently abstracted, categorized, reduced to “round numbers,” so that they can be handled without having to make innovative and creative adjustments for exceptional cases-let alone whole new improvisations for every fresh encounter-then such individuals feel comfortable and at home in their world.”
From, The Psychic Grid
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2514170.The_Psychic_Grid
Internalise revolutionary optimism and give other’s reasons to have hope.
💚
I agree and there’s an argument from Marxist theory: dialectics teaches us, that change is universal, because matter is in motion (Engels) and contradictions are universal (Mao). Change comes from struggle between opposing aspects and everything is made up of those. Even if things seem temporarily stable, that’s just a temporary phase in the struggle.
“It is what it is” is one of my most hated thought terminating clichés after my normie stepfather abused it over the years whenever a discussion came up about something bad happening somewhere in the world. “Yes, the thing happening is bad. But what do you expect me to do about it??” Believes the system is corrupt, but will then shrug it all off and go back to his booze and his Xbox.
Nietzschean bullshit, that phrase is! Nothing is eternally what is is now, and thus can’t be pure identity (identity as in equal to itself)
i would love to live in a world where my actions have any measurable outcome at all
“Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes.”
- The Kind Vladimir Ilyich
You’re essentially correct but it’s hard to be optimistic when the vast majority of the world is in an ideological stupor, if the current status quo continues without any extremely dramatic shocks I think there will be any global change in consciousness before climate change really hits, the best we can hope for is for climate change to not be as catastrophic as often predicted.
Talking to people around me about this shit feels like this meme template over and over again, people generally agree with me but on the last step their brain just short circuits.
The thing is I am also pessimistic, I’m also in a stupor a lot of the time just trying to survive as a neurodivergent bag of trauma. I fully understand why everyone’s tired and it’s valid. I’m tired too. Burnout is real and it’s not something anyone should force themselves to brute force.
The thing that bothers me more is that people will sneer at the idea of anyone, anywhere, even trying to find a solution. The idea that even wanting something better is some sort of childish delusion that people should be reprimanded for even suggesting. The kind of people who if given a button that would end all suffering, would choose not to because “it isn’t natural”.
💚
Nothing sadder than seeing this species resign itself to premature extinction.
Most of our species thinks absolutely nothing about climate change. Certainly doesn’t think we are going to go extinct from it. There’s only a small, tiny fraction of us that understands how bad it is going to be.
Yes I have reached acceptance. But I understand where that’s hard, especially if you love your life and other people more then this miserable piece of shit.
Isn’t part of the “point” behind fatalistic thinking that this problem is so large and we really can’t force all these evil people to just stop drilling? So all freaking out about climate change is doing is self-harm?
I get the mindset of “invent shoes” but realistically most of us aren’t in a place to get people to wear the shoes even if we made them. The more I learn about humanity the more I realize a lot of people will refuse to wear the shoes for no logical reason because we’re not logical creatures.
shit, masks exist and there’s an airborne plague going around but nobody will fucking wear one.
There is no plague in Ba Sing-Se
Fully agree. The majority of people is in blissful ignorance and spends little thoughts about climate change.
