By Caitlin Johnstone | Source
Saying “I’m not into politics” is just saying “I support status quo politics.” It’s saying you endorse all the violence, exploitation, ecocide and abuse of the current order.
Politics are always happening all around you in every moment of every day, whether you are “into” it or not. Everything you do in your everyday life is pervasively shaped by local and national laws, by economic systems, by oligarchy, by propaganda, by war, by militarism, by imperialist extraction, by government regulations and the lack thereof. Saying you don’t feel like paying attention to these factors is just saying you’re fine with the way they are presently happening.
It’s like if every time a family sat down to a meal the son took all the daughter’s food and the parents did nothing about it, saying “I’m not into politics” whenever the issue came up. The daughter would conclude that her parents were fine with her brother’s behavior, and that they did not care about her as a person. And she would be correct. Their inaction and indifference would be just as consequential as any actions they might take, and just as revealing of their personal character.
Politics are always happening to you. You have no say in this. The only thing you get a say in is what actions you will take to change the way they are happening.
“I don’t do politics.”
Okay well politics is doing you.
Those products you use didn’t create themselves and bring themselves to your home.
Your boss doesn’t pay you overtime and give you weekends off because he loves you.
The technology you use to transport yourself doesn’t look the way it looks by accident.
Healthcare and education don’t cost you what they cost you by some fluke of nature.
The summers aren’t getting hotter because the sun is getting closer, and the reason you’re seeing fewer insects than you saw when you were a child is not because the bugs committed suicide.
Every part of your life is dramatically affected by the political actions of others. Your political inaction is an action, and it’s an action in favor of the political status quo.
“I don’t do politics” means I support genocide. It means I support war. It means I support injustice and exploitation. It means I support ordinary people getting poorer and sicker while the biosphere dies and the billionaires turn into trillionaires. It means I support our headlong plunge into mass extinction and dystopia.
The other day a popular leftish YouTuber made a post asking why leftists are always slamming her as a genocidal Zionist when she’s never explicitly supported the genocide in Gaza. I wound up telling her, “People see you as pro-genocide because you are far from sufficiently anti-genocide in a political environment where being anti-genocide is of utmost importance to people of conscience. I am a left-wing political commentator, and if I had spent three years de-emphasizing and dismissing the Gaza holocaust I am 100% certain that many leftists would be hounding me about it to this day, even if I made the occasional tweet saying Benjamin Netanyahu is bad. People would see my output as not reflecting the urgency of the issue at hand, and they would criticize me as unacceptably sympathetic to the forces giving rise to the genocide.”
Inaction is an action, and when things are profoundly unjust, it’s an action in support of injustice. If your house is burning and you don’t take action to remove yourself and your loved ones from danger, your inaction isn’t neutral. Your decision not to act is itself an action of immense consequence.
That’s the boat we’re all in right now. Politics is pervading every aspect of our experience of life on this planet. Our only volition is in what we choose to do about this inescapable reality.
There is something very good and true about the notion “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”, taking responsibility for ourselves is sometimes painful but inevitable – and I think this is what the author aimed for.
But she completely missed the mark. Instead she puts everyone in her own sinking boat and tell people to row or die. Politics as it is a lie, a facade carried out by people with weapons of many different kinds.
After all the effort to see through the deception, you want to guilt-trip us for doing it? Wrong audience, lady. At least, so I hope.
Bad Religion – Inner Logic
Ludicrous. I can be aware of what’s going on politically and choose to put my time, energy, attention, belief, etc elsewhere. This narrow POV of the world is exactly what keeps us entrenched in old ways. If you’re not capable of sustaining a vision of another way to be and live in the world, you’ll never escape the old paradigm. The author’s inability to envision anything else is their responsibility to unravel, not anyone else’s. There are 9 billion people on the planet. Not all of them are going to focus on the same thing at the same time. That’s the point. We all have our part to play, and not all of us are here to do anything remotely connected to politics. This logic is asinine. This post smacks of someone newly awakened who lacks contextual understanding and nuance. I see someone who has a lot of work to do on dismantling the victim programming that they’ve been indoctrinated into.
Or…nothing is pro-humanity in it. So why feed it? Nothing we do changes things for the better so why give power to what is outside our desires? We deserve better than slavery, but that’s what we have.
Exacto! Pyramid of power, control, greed, abuse & the majority at or near the bottom. 💯Anti-human. Nor will we vote our way out of this corruption.
Humans will eventually need to unite … but we are presently too busy hating/fighting each other⚔️
Quite the dilemma!
Yes, politics/ elections have a HUGE impact on our lives, and by voting we help manifest our ideals.
But – not everyone has the time or energy to make well-informed decisions, especially with all the misinformation/disinformation in our media.
A note about Gaza – genocide, yes, but the tragic reality is that extremists on BOTH sides need each other to stay in power! Over the decades there Peacemakers have been thwarted and even assassinated, while so many Palestinians and Israelis just want to raise their families in peace and prosperity.
I don’t agree. People simply don’t have time or energy to try and fix all the bad things in the world. So it’s rational that people prioritize, which also means not focusing on certain things.
With this logic, you can endlessly gotcha people: “oho, you’re not working to fix [this particular bad thing], therefore you support [this particular bad thing.]” It’s unproductive and exhausting.
I agree.