On Extremism
Oh look, Krinn venting. This is an angry post that is unlikely to be read by anyone who it attacks - but it needed writing.
I finally realized why it rankles me when people say “oh all extremists are alike.” The part I already knew was that generally, “oh the extremists on both sides are equally bad,” is
Not Even Wrong (or possibly wronger than wrong). This is especially evident when people talk about atheism and theism (you may not like Richard Dawkins, but there are theists who want to kill you) or about matters of politics (you may not like Noam Chomsky, but Barack Obama thinks it’s okay to send flying death robots to other countries and use them to kill people).
But aside from that - when people like the imbecilic Haim Hariri say that “the extremists in the two edges always end up in the same place,“ that’s not actually a factual statement. That’s a dismissive statement, a tribalistic statement, an unthinking statement. That says - “these people are all different from me, they must all be the same.” The only way that extremists are the same is this: they all threaten the status quo. When you say “all those extremists are alike,” all you are doing is allowing yourself to class all extremists with the ones you think are Just Crazy - you are sparing yourself from having to think about what the extremists actually advocate. That is an absolute cop-out - it is a thought-terminating cliché and should with the rest of its brethren be ruthlessly extirpated from the human discourse.
The extremists all want to upset your comfort, and there the similarities end. Pretending that they - that we - are all the same, is fleeing from the responsibility of critical thought. Further, it’s abdicating discourse-power to the people who are counting on you to stop thinking when confronted with unfamiliar ideas - the people who are moving to extreme positions because you proudly “centrist,” proudly “moderate” wankers inevitably split the difference between two positions without considering the merits fully.
So I’m pretty fucking tired of hearing about how feminism is as bad as patriarchy,
how atheism is as bad as the Crusades,
how socialism is as bad as fascism,
how my hard-won hard-thought hard-endured convictions are not worth actually thinking about or engaging with or considering: they’re just another set of extremisms.
Fuck that noise.
Enlightenment for all beings is my extremism: for all that I think they’re wrong, that one status-quo-threatening point of commonality among extremists all means that they’ve actually thought about the way the world is - and the way it could be. That’s a bigger step towards enlightenment than just taking the weltanschauung your culture gives you and living in that box all your life.
I finally realized why it rankles me when people say “oh all extremists are alike.” The part I already knew was that generally, “oh the extremists on both sides are equally bad,” is
Not Even Wrong (or possibly wronger than wrong). This is especially evident when people talk about atheism and theism (you may not like Richard Dawkins, but there are theists who want to kill you) or about matters of politics (you may not like Noam Chomsky, but Barack Obama thinks it’s okay to send flying death robots to other countries and use them to kill people).
But aside from that - when people like the imbecilic Haim Hariri say that “the extremists in the two edges always end up in the same place,“ that’s not actually a factual statement. That’s a dismissive statement, a tribalistic statement, an unthinking statement. That says - “these people are all different from me, they must all be the same.” The only way that extremists are the same is this: they all threaten the status quo. When you say “all those extremists are alike,” all you are doing is allowing yourself to class all extremists with the ones you think are Just Crazy - you are sparing yourself from having to think about what the extremists actually advocate. That is an absolute cop-out - it is a thought-terminating cliché and should with the rest of its brethren be ruthlessly extirpated from the human discourse.
The extremists all want to upset your comfort, and there the similarities end. Pretending that they - that we - are all the same, is fleeing from the responsibility of critical thought. Further, it’s abdicating discourse-power to the people who are counting on you to stop thinking when confronted with unfamiliar ideas - the people who are moving to extreme positions because you proudly “centrist,” proudly “moderate” wankers inevitably split the difference between two positions without considering the merits fully.
So I’m pretty fucking tired of hearing about how feminism is as bad as patriarchy,
how atheism is as bad as the Crusades,
how socialism is as bad as fascism,
how my hard-won hard-thought hard-endured convictions are not worth actually thinking about or engaging with or considering: they’re just another set of extremisms.
Fuck that noise.
Enlightenment for all beings is my extremism: for all that I think they’re wrong, that one status-quo-threatening point of commonality among extremists all means that they’ve actually thought about the way the world is - and the way it could be. That’s a bigger step towards enlightenment than just taking the weltanschauung your culture gives you and living in that box all your life.