Anyone have any advice on just kind of hating people in general less? I look at people, I know they’re huge on religious doctrines and societal models I have no place in, and I just can’t see any good in them worth considering. I try to go outside and connect with people, but everyone looks like a 4channer, or someone two slights away from becoming a 4channer. I can’t restrain the fear or loathing. It’s like the past twenty years have reduced my very capacity for compassion and my capacity to respect anyone period to molten slag.
Heteronormative society and all who uphold it fucking blow, but I’m expected to keep it in my pants re: how and when I take it out on them.
What reengages my empathy muscle is remembering that lots of these people are fucking miserable, even if they lack the introspection to appreciate it. Imagine being a fucking evangelical conservative housewife for instance - no real agency or support or avenue to grow. Even imagine yourself as an evangelical conservative bread-winning husband - no real avenue for self expression or discovery, and you harm the people around you constantly without a framework to understand that.
Even when you look at fascist states like Israel, how fucking tragic for all of those indoctrinated people that their worldview is as narrow and corrupted as it is, and, honestly, most of those people didn’t have a hope in hell. Fucking cooked because they happened to be born in a fascist state.
Whenever I go down this line of thinking, I always end up feeling that it’s just so… sadly rational that so many awful people are full of that weird impotent rage.
NB: I am also definitely not saying that I’m some saint who can always keep this thinking, it is truly advice on framing that makes me personally hate people less when I have the energy for it.
i have a similar issue at times and i’ve found embracing a buddhist mindset has helped me with this. i think buddhism and marxism are pretty compatible worldviews, even if they seem very opposed at first.
to cut straight to the answer to your question: try to replace hate with compassion. when you find yourself expending mental energy on hating a specific group of people (bourgeoisie, CHUDs online, etc), remind yourself that 1) they are not content with their inner lives and that’s why they behave in a way that makes you hate them and 2) they are suffering due to capitalism, even if they’re suffering is different in both kind a degree from yours. even the “winners” in this system are miserable (e.g., elon musk. the richest dude on earth is also deeply unhappy)
note the emphasis on teh word “try” in the previous paragraph. you will fail at having compassion for your enemies, and that’s ok – you’re only human and you need to have compassion for yourself as well when you fail. just making the effort will make you less hateful and angry
Death to America
this is basically my answer as well. something about reading Debt made it click for me.
hmmm i read that book years ago, before i really either solidified my understanding of marxism or opened myself to buddhism at all. can you elaborate on what you feel the connection is between Debt and using compassion as an antidote to being a hate-pilled leftcel?
Death to America
it gave me context to feel a compassionate through-line for human existence and appreciate more the historical development of global civilization from a pretty materialist lens. as applied to my personal history, having a lens to view the development of judaism and christianity as an expression of cultural response to material conditions and in relation to debt and economic relations gave me a way to psychologically distance myself from feeling a need to negotiate with the religion as an insider. approaching it from a historical materialist perspective, i think graeber also unintentionally paints a convincing portrait of the interaction of technology, capital, people, and the psychological traumas people inflict upon one another. i had been raised to be generally compassionate in principle, but by relatively ignorant and poor practitioners. in other words, graeber’s approach to history and the specific content that he focused on to develop his theory of debt as a panhistorical economic driver and instrument of power and recurring example of a superhuman (larger than a human can successfully reason about concretely) abstract that drove humans to think more abstractly about everything. that last part, along with a materialist approach to integrating history, filled in the gaps that I had from understanding Marx as applied with less eurocentrism than Marx was capable of.
this is very insightful, thank you for sharing! i think i need to go back and read debt again now that im no longer as much of a baby leftist
Death to America
GOOD post
Obviously there’s a lot to unpack here and it sounds like your issues go deeper than what internet discussions can fix, but I would recommend the following:
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stop making assumptions about people. Everything you’ve said suggests that you are making judgments about people’s entire world view and personality based on fleeting interactions. You don’t know shit about them.
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people are nuanced and contain multitudes of thoughts, opinions, behaviours, emotions, etc. their outward expression on any given day is dependent on a bunch of stuff like hunger, tiredness, stress level, etc.
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take a dialectical view. The whole point of leftist theory is that things, including people, can and do change. Implicit in your hatred is the assumption that negative things you observe are the natural or sole state of someone, which is contrary to leftist thought.
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actually make connections with people. Empathise with them. Think about why they are saying what they say. Think about how you would respond if you had the experiences that made up their life. And if the answer is “my life was similar but I made it out”, try to turn that into empathy and not condescension. Not everyone is as capable of throwing off the shackles they were born with by themselves.
stop making assumptions about people. Everything you’ve said suggests that you are making judgments about people’s entire world view and personality based on fleeting interactions. You don’t know shit about them.
this is similar to something called fundamental attribution error
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I’d like to add that a common symptom of burnout is the exhaustion of empathy. When you no longer have the energy to care for yourself, you cannot care much about other people either.
Take care of yourself, comrade. <3
Do you work retail? Cuz not working retail helped a lot. I got laid off from my manufacturing job and had to go back to it and now I’m considering worshiping the ruinous powers to bring humanity to and end in the name of CHAOS!
I work in retail full-time and somehow don’t hate people, so that’s some sort of achievement I suppose
Retail is the fastest route to motherfuckin hating Amerikans; deep enough to consider sellin they asses out to their enemies when someone finally gets their nuts up to attack us; these consumers ain’t housebroke at all.
Night of the Consumers isn’t a horror game, it’s a fuckin documentary
This is why I keep saying I can’t go back to retail; I will lose everything that makes me a comrade but my theoretical knowledge if I have to work that ring of hell again.
Seriously it’s bad for worker solidarity too. The turnover rate is so high and so many employees are either teenagers or retired people just trying to make extra cash, so often surrounded by lazy and/or incompetent people who frustrate you to no end. I have so many shifts where I’m the only one working while everyone else has their thumb up there ass, some stoner fuck forgot how to use the key duplication machine despite me showing him 20 FUCKING TIMES! and a cashier who’s worked here a year is asking me WHAT AISLE THE BATHROOM IS IN!!!
Four years in food service retail here. I felt all of this. Add to that a completely inept manager who loves Israel and it’s a small wonder I hate people now lmao.
Get involved with people doing work. Volunteer, mutual aid, etc. Believe it or not, feeling better about yourself helps you see the good in others too.
Not sure any advice on a website is going to do you much good. Clearly you’re struggling with something but the way you’ve described your perspective it seems like you regard yourself as better than others.
What drove you to the left other than compassion for your fellow human? Surely you know some people who don’t even know what 4chan is or at least didn’t know it was still around. If you hate everyone what’s the point of fighting to make their lives better?
What drove you to the left other than compassion for your fellow human?
Well it sure as hell wasn’t profit.
It was profit, but not mine.
What drove you to the left other than compassion for your fellow human?
So people here say this a lot, but I think there’s a bunch of different things that draw people to the left besides empathy.
For one I would point out, most of us, myself included, are massive smarty pants nerds who like digging up random historical sources to own Libs and CHUDs. I think the self satisfaction of being right about fucking everything is a big draw. I think this was the case for a lot of historical communists too, Marx and Lenin def smart boys who liked being right about everything.
I think there’s also the belief that this is the right direction for human history to progress. I may not care a ton for a lot of humans alive right now, but what does my personal distaste matter? History marches on and I want to be on the right side of it.
This is incredibly sad to me.
If the reason you’re a leftist is that you want to win internet arguments, you will never actually organise or contribute to the cause. Then what is the point other than feeding your dopamine addiction?
Be useful.
1: I would point out you don’t know anything about me and what I do in my actual life
2: You can still organize while finding people frustrating and annoying, if anything it makes it more commendable when you do. Example: Lenin.
you will never actually organise or contribute to the cause.
yeah i mean the rank ableism of society was preventing that anyway, the same way it robbed me of my opportunity to be socialized properly and makes it impossible to do anything that requires another person
Be useful.
What drove you to the left other than compassion for your fellow human?
The Silver Rule (“do not do unto others what you do not want done unto you”) can get you most of the way there without compassion taking the wheel. In the wrong circumstances it can backfire, of course.
l’m sure there are people who aren’t entirely compassionate but have found out that it’s the correct system by all the obvious flaws in capitalism.
What drove you to the left other than compassion for your fellow human?
If I’m honest? My utter hatred and bone-deep contempt for white Amerika. The only compassion or empathy I still nurture is for those the Settler empire oppresses; and even that has become contingent on whether they stand against the Settler, or have cooned out and placed themselves back under His thumb. I hate living in this country, I hate being both literally and metaphorically surrounded by the tacit, oppressive philosophy and habitus of Whiteness, I hate having to pretend I don’t just to be able to clear next month’s rent in a shitty apartment I got redlined into, I hate being condescended to like I just have to accept that shit isn’t going to change in this country in my lifetime.
If I don’t make it out, if I don’t find somewhere to go where I’m not getting profiled by some cracker because I didn’t hide the texture of my hair from them, I’m going to live under the yoke of crackers, likely for the rest of my life. My nephews and nieces, since ain’t no way I’m giving this slave state more grist for its crushing wheels, they will likely live under that yoke too. And I fucking hate it.
When I say “I’m only out here for my folk” I honest-to-God mean it.
Resentment/fear of the right and the heteronormative social structure they (and to some extent all people) uphold, mostly. They’ve treated me like shit my whole life for multiple reasons, and will continue to do so no matter what I do.
I’ll be honest, I don’t want to not hate straight people and neurotypicals, but I probably need to.
It’s not that I’m better than them, it’s that I’m incompatible with their structures.
There are people I like, and I used to like most of them more, but after nearly 20 years of putting up with the right’s much stronger, much more persistent shit I’ve just been worn down in general. The positive matters less to the point of slipping beneath my notice, the negative matters even more and grows to dominate my life.
I just focus my hate onto the ruling class.
Historical materialism. Understanding that a person is largely shaped by their conditions allows you to realise that expurging brainworms is really hard, but not impossible.
It also allows you to realise that being nice to you and having your interests at heart are two very, very different things.
Part of me wonders if you’re overstimulated. People have different limits and that can really affect how you deal with people. I have built up a tolerance for bullshit over the years working in retail, I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.
Yeah, dealing with customers is one thing but eighteen years of internet politics (and their real life counterpart) have just fucking broiled me. Not gonna stop, though, so I need to find some kind of new strength.
I for a long time thought of myself as an angry or even hateful person, but in the last few years I’ve realized it’s because I love people generally that I can feel that way - when you have someone for their racism or sexism, it may help you to find peace if you consider that the reason it makes you hate is your love for those marginalized peoples.
When it comes to seeing people like that, I try to keep it mind “There but for the grace of God go I” - I’m in my late twenties and a white guy who grew up in rural America, had I not been exposed to leftist works during my schooling, it’s very easy to imagine a world where I had fallen into very hateful ideologies. If you can see in others how they have ended up how they are, it’s easier to understand them and maybe you’ll still dislike or have them, but it’s something you can pair with “I wish it didn’t turn out this way for you.”
I struggled with this for a long time too.
I’m going to do the meme here and say “reading theory” helps a lot but it’s true. It helped me anyway. Particularly anything relating to propaganda. If you think people are stupid it is likely they were made stupid with willful intent. They are victims and the correct people to hate are the people vested in keeping it that way.
I also learned a lot from reading about Che. He confused me when I was younger because for someone who talked about love so much he committed an awful lot of violence. A true romantic if there ever was one.
we are all a product of our material conditions, which means that if society gets better people will to. this is what i tell me to motivate myself to do real-world organizing.
also, people in immigrant communities are usually pretty sweet.
It sounds kind of paradoxical but being around strangers can help
the times in my life when a random passerby offered me something I needed were very powerful experiences for me
I’m learning to hate people more but in general the thing that earnestly held me back was just using empathy - even if i am objectively in the right I can still see how people get to a decision or behavior usually, and it always regulated me to remind myself i’m just another dipshit with stuff going on that someone is gonna see and absolutely fucking hate, and thereby hate me.
I just try to give the benefit of the doubt that I’d want. I don’t have people’s story. I don’t know how they got to whatever they’re doing, or why.
But also this never covered all use cases and sometimes it’s just better to hate. I dunno man it feels like it degrades me to lean into it though, i kinda hate hate
