[pp.int.general] My thoughts at present

[carlo von lynX]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 03:28:31AM -0700, Paul Tidwell wrote:
> I don't understand ANY form of prejudice myself it really confuses me.
> People are not born with that hatred it has to be taught to them. Why are
> peole homophobic?

After n years in this movement I realize that one of the most
important lessons a political movement needs to learn is to
accept humans with their sociologically well-known weaknesses
and work with them, without neither getting cynical (what
"conservative"/manipulatory political forces do) nor getting
ideologically optimistic about how good people could be if you
only teached them (what pirates and other 1968-influenced
movements do), then build systems that depend on such ideal
humans to actually exist.

Take democracy as an example, it is a social "technology" that
has evolved from accepting sociological requirements and building
upon them. That's why it mostly works (except for the 'corruption'
bug) while communism, socialism, anarchism and even capitalism 
mostly fail as they were designed for humans to be something better
than who they actually are.

To me, true humanism isn't expecting crazy things from humans, but
rather to produce the structures (both legal and technological)
that empower the human to transcend their sociologically inevitable
fallabilities and produce a collective intelligence that actually
does good for humankind.

Asking humans for their superficial opinion on things without
requiring them to either delegate or dig deep into a rational
process of understanding of the matter they are required to
decide upon is IMHO not humanistic - it is populistic - and it
is doomed to backfire.

It is not hatred that keeps people from accepting that two men
can raise a child. It is lack of understanding and laziness to
actually learn the reality of such a situation. It can turn to
hatred if they then believe they have a right to impose their
prejudice on others and that their method of laziness is legit.

So the problem is the idea that superficiality is legitimate.
It can convince all kinds of folks to do stupid things.

Even regarding racism, I don't think it starts with hatred. It
starts with fear of the foreign. It starts with lack of empathy
and laziness to confront a change of a situation. If such laziness
is declared acceptable and legitimate it can lead to racism,
actual hatred and stupid action.

Some racists are actually smart enough to understand that migration
is only an effect of our broken capitalist system, but rather than
revolt against capitalism they still prefer to engage in what Germans
call Verteilungskämpfe: battles of distribution of wealth among those
having less rather than confronting the super-rich.


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