What is the World we Fight For?
The internet is terrible place for thoughtful discourse. Or self-analysis that unearths difficult truths. The internet does not want nuanced introspection, it wants brute certainty. That is why extremism is so prevalent, not just politically, but also psychologically. The world is either terrible or beautiful. Our lives are either soaring and prosperous, or apocalyptically hopeless. This is not the place for truth, which is multifaceted and uncomfortable. This is the place for giving people certainty and assuaging self-doubt in our worldview.
I see it in the activism of my artistic community. Capitalizing on the concepts of racial inequality and historical injustice, my fellow leftists abuse terms like “colonialism” and “privilege”, “power”, and “white supremacy” without much thought as to the why’s and how’s of such concepts, of our complicity with them, and of why we are so bothered by such concepts. I have seen the word “Free” next to a number of completely independent, sovereign nations which by most definitions, are “free”. What people mean by freedom and equality is entirely subjective, since the activists who use these terms are not concerned with the realities of global politics, let alone local politics, let alone what it means to run a country.
The effect is similar to what we see in movies like Star Wars or the Hunger Games. A poorly defined rebel movement is fighting against a poorly defined empire. Political beliefs in these films is reduced to “The people in charge are evil, and the regular people are good”. Hunger Games adds a slight bit of newness by making the rebel leader bad as well, thus sending the message that any leader is bad, but if that is the case, why when the two bad guys of the story are dead, everything is fine? Doesn’t there have to be new leaders, who by the definition of being a leader, are bad? Will anyone answer the question of what society exactly the rebels are fighting for? What does a good society look like? Such questions are never even raised, and this is true in online discourse as well. We hear so much noise about what is wrong with the world, yet nobody details what a good world would look like outside of it being one that people who think, act, and look like “us” get everything we want.
But will that even satisfy us? Now this is a question that gets us closer to the real questions we are searching for. What will satisfy us? Whether you are liberal or conservative, what satisfies you, as an individual, is dependent on a variety of factors pertaining to your upbringing, life experiences, what class you were born into, etc. and that means when you talk in the public sphere, your beliefs are muddled by the various experiences of others. This is why broad slogans work so well, to unite a group of people we need a finite goal with a general road to reaching it. The challenge of leadership is filling the generalities of our impulses with the specifics of a plan, and as any leader will tell you, once you get into specifics, you start satisfying less and less people.
The voices of the internet are not interested in leadership for this very reason — they seek broad approval, and that means generalized complaining with no real solution. In regard to something like Palestine, what exactly does a ceasefire accomplish when the root causes of the conflict aren’t addressed? But the people who cry out for a ceasefire are not dealing with specifics, as that would require leadership, and leadership means losing followers once you set a plan into action.
Again, what will satisfy us if solutions alienate us more? Let us ask another question, What is the world you are fighting for? That depends on the person and the million factors of their life. One person’s heaven is another person’s hell. Then let us ask a follow up question, Why are we fighting at all? Why are we marching on the streets? Why are we pressuring others to agree with us? Why are we seeking consensus but not solutions?
My theory is that social movements that promote “freedom” or “de-colonization” or “liberation of thought” etc are really about a lack of purpose. The overuse of the idea of colonization is a skeleton key to this argument. When people can, by every political and social metric, be free to do as they want, and yet be “colonized” then perhaps you don’t know what the word or concept of colonization is. So why use the term? Because oppressing, real or imagined, provides purpose. You are fighting for your liberation, but the problem becomes when you don’t know what you are being freed from.
Yet struggle provides purpose, and I believe that my generation, millenials, have been left without a clear sense of direction or purpose. We grew up in the aftermath of the Cold War, so demonizing Russia wasn’t potent for us, and then the War on Terror was a fiasco, and then a financial crisis ruined our career plans, and then a pandemic threw us into even greater disarray. We have spent our lives looking for causes to set our struggles against, but we also are a generation that seeks broad approval for our beliefs. We are a generation that lacks clear enemies, and so anyone in power becomes an enemy, yet, contradicting this, in order to fix any problems we see, we have to be in power.
Power corrupts, sure, power is also necessary for change. Leaders are needed to progress society, and to lead a group of people, you have to be a bit of a megalomaniac. That is why when people running for president try to act humble it rings so false. Nobody runs for president with low esteem. Millienials wants to see change in the world, but defining that change means losing broad support, and leading that change means being the kind of person you’ve demonized for years, and to have the power to enact change means possibly corrupting yourself, when you’ve grown up believing in the importance of self-righteousness.
This quagmire speaks to a profound lack of bravery — to be disliked, to be wrong, to be bold. Yes, there are real problems in the world, and you won’t fix any of them if you don’t take risks. Taking risks gives you purpose, and it is my generation’s fear of risk that has left us a muddled mess of directionless complaining with no solutions in sight.
The answer, it seems to me, is to get off the internet, and talk with people and engage in the communities in the real world, and seek less grand gestures of importance, because the older I get, the more value I see in my interpersonal relationships rather than radically altering the world. Maybe I just lack the megalomania to say that the world should be any sort of way, but I do have the confidence to say what kinds of relationships I want, and the sort of community I want to build around me.