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.

  • tithonis [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    13·
    5 days ago

    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.

    • Wertheimer [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      8·
      5 days ago

      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.