Over the past few years, I’ve been sliding left ideologically, and as I move further left my old positions seem cringy.
That’s expected when you change your worldview and realize you were parroting (e.g.) CIA propaganda, but it’s left me feeling a bit ungrounded. I’m worried that in another year I’ll look back and think my current views are dumb. Tbh, they almost certainly are.
Does this go away eventually? Or are y’all constantly refining your understanding, so you always dislike your views from a year ago?
Also:
If folks leave, where do they go from here? Are they just picking their preferred flavor of communism/anarchism? Are there other categories of leftism that they’re heading to? I’m sure some backslide, but I mean heading somewhere new - like I didn’t know people actually liked DPRK until I heard about “tankies.” I saw a group that doesn’t believe in objective reality?
I’m not really expecting to look at anything new and not be a Marxist, but I’d like to know what’s out there to be sure.
I just wanna pick one goddamn worldview, never change it, and still be right about everything all the time. Is that so much to ask?
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Never changing your world view is dogmatism and dogmatism is counter to leftism and it’s principals. As a Marxist I except that my world view will be challenged and changed, since life is an ever unfolding process of change. Conditions change, and your analysis of those conditions will change your view of the world. The material world shapes your consciousness. The more you learn the more your consciousness becomes aligned with the material world. It is inescapable.
What you recognize as cringe was your false consciousness. That false consciousness was developed by the material world as well. Through the narrow window built for you by the ruling ideas of the ruling class.
This is the class struggle.
I just wanna pick one goddamn worldview, never change it, and still be right about everything all the time. Is that so much to ask?
yes, completely
FUCK
The boat will never be waterproof. Only thing to do is find a good bucket and get to bailing. I recommend the historical materialism/dialectical materialism bucket.
You at MLM yet?
depends how old you are, but nobody is ever 100% correct, and anyone who thinks they can’t be wrong is a delusion and egotistical shitbag.
Once youre a marxist though, the % of correctness is pretty solid, as long as you have concrete values.
I was against the iraq/afghan wars in middle school when they started, but was still mostly lib until 2012 when i discovered bernie and realized Obama and Dems didnt accomplish anything. Bernie getting fucked out of the presidency turned me into a marxist. I also didnt really use reddit until like 2016 and that also helped alot. I hadn’t really spent time on political message boards, mostly gaming and nerd forums. So luckily ive always been anti war, but i wasnt always anti capitalist. So maybe 3 times in my life would i have thought “damn i cant believe i thought that a year ago.” I was at least a lib/Dem from the start, i know someone who was the republican kid in high school and he’s a marxist now.
But do i really think about how i was wrong at some point? It should be acknowledged but you can’t overthink it.
Boomer take: fuck i hate the word cringe.
On the one hand, yes I’m always reading more, trying to educate myself more, talking more about issues with other people, etc., and therfore I am always updating my beliefs and discarding old ones, some of which are cringe.
But on the other hand, my overall worldview has not changed for some time. I’ve been a Marxist Leninist for about a decade now. The beliefs I’m updating are smaller things (some important still, but nothing at all like what things were like when in a couple of years I went from libertarian (I was a child, in my defense) to ancom to ML.)
Yes, I’m in a similar boat. My general worldview has generally stayed the same since I was a child: every human deserves human rights. The vehicle by which I want to see that out, though, is what’s changed, as well as specifically what those rights ought to be.
I don’t know if this is true, because I’m definitely not a determinist by any stretch, but there is a part of me that believes that those core fundamental bits are fairly well solidified by the time we reach adulthood. Like, the framework stays the same, but what it looks like is what changes. Iunno I’m just rambling.
No. Even the most celebrated revolutionaries in history had cringe takes.
Stalin fucking HATED deaf people for example
Inside all humans is a particle of cringe
He also recriminalized homosexuality. And he stopped at Berlin.
in his defense, deaf people never seem to listen
grains of cringe are necessary are on the road to a heap of based
You don’t always have to have a ‘take’ on everything.
What helps is focusing on my local community. You can apply theory freely to making the world a better place right outside your front door.
It is wise to be aware of complex global issues, but I think that taking part of a discussion on the (global) internet is going to feel ungrounding because of the diversity of participants and the increased complexity. A more local or regional focus offers a “big fish in a small pond” effect and can feel very grounding, since legacy media that people around you consume is going to have a national or global focus.
Took me an embarrassingly long time to realize this. You don’t have to know everything and have the absolute correctest opinion on everything. In fact you should be very skeptical of people that claim that do.
“having takes” is cringe, so no
Oooh very hot take
You’re learning and you’re growing. You should feel good about that.
You’re right, it’s mostly hard when I share my bad takes with other (more liberal) folks, since ideally I’d like to have a consistent message.
I guess it’s pretty easy to just say “I’ve actually been learning more about X and…”
I don’t really feel cringe about my previous positions. They were based on the education I had at that time which was liberal indoctrination, and I don’t fault myself for it and am happy I learned more.
There are so many things still unclear to me, I don’t know my political ideology and there are some parts about the organizing I do that I’m unsure of. But I keep doing it to the best of my ability because committed organizers are rare and doing something while making mistakes and learning from them is better than doing nothing.
In my opinion the best way to learn is by putting theory to practice because then you start to notice the gaps in the theory you read and know what to look for for future learning. You can join an org even if you aren’t sure if you fully agree with its methods and ideology. You can always leave if it turns out that it doesn’t suit you. No org is perfect but you should have some feeling that you are able to actually build something through it.
I have this same feeling almost constantly and I’m over 40. I’ve been a “leftist” of some variety most of my life, especially if we’re counting anything that’s anti-capitalist as left. I look at it as a good thing. My present self might cringe at my past self, but that’s the cost of learning new shit.
I only really accepted this in the last 5 years or so doing software development. I have worked on the same project for 6+ years and constantly run into my old code and think how terrible it is and how could I ever be this dumb, etc. Now I just view that experience as the cost of improving.
If I looked at my old code (or my old ideology) and it was exactly the same as it is now, I would probably cringe even harder.
The moment you believe you have cast aside all cringe is the moment you have become truly cringe. Your best defense against posting cringe is to view your battle against it as an ongoing process that will exist until FALGSC does.
Good perspective, thank you!
Keep and eye out for my next post, Dr. Strangedil or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cringe.
I used to have a lot of cringe takes when I was a youngster just getting into politics the first time. Worse yet, I rarely kept this cringe to myself and would rant about it publicly, online and offline. The problem? No investigation. Without investigation, one has no right to speak, as I am sure you have heard.
Does this go away eventually? Or are y’all constantly refining your understanding, so you always dislike your views from a year ago?
education is a constant process. but as you progress, the scale of the “cringe” decreases. so for instance my takes a year ago are not super different from my takes now. as opposed to my takes a year before joining a marxist org and a year after.
If folks leave, where do they go from here? Are they just picking their preferred flavor of communism/anarchism? Are there other categories of leftism that they’re heading to? I’m sure some backslide, but I mean heading somewhere new - like I didn’t know people actually liked DPRK until I heard about “tankies.” I saw a group that doesn’t believe in objective reality?
- what do you mean by leave?
- ideology is not a supermarket, you dont pick a flavor.
- im not sure wha “heading to other categories of leftism” means
I’m not really expecting to look at anything new and not be a Marxist, but I’d like to know what’s out there to be sure.
i would really recommend to look at marxist orgs in your area
I just wanna pick one goddamn worldview, never change it, and still be right about everything all the time. Is that so much to ask?
thats not how self improvement and science work. it is important to always keep refining your understanding of yourself and the world
as you progress, the scale of the “cringe” decreases
That’s kinda what I figured the best case was
What do you mean by leave
I guess like how I used to consider myself a liberal, but now I don’t
ideology is not a supermarket, you dont pick a flavor
Fair, I just meant the different branches, e.g. ML vs MLM
im not sure wha "heading to other categories of leftism means
Yeah I mean honestly me either - the answer very well could be “that doesn’t exist.” Broadly, I went liberal -> soc dem -> anarchist -> ML, which I think is a relatively common progression, and I guess the question is whether some folks have “-> ???” Ultimately it’s not important, but I think my curiosity comes from discovering new bubbles.
would really recommend to look at marxist orgs in your area
On it!
no. they are the necessary precondition to good takes…
thing is called growth , and the point of the growth is for your mind to get a handle on the shit. the best way to teach that is you crinching about the things you onced belived strongly.
as you then will learn how easly you could be tricked to belive the shi and then can analyse how it was made to work on you.
what is tormenting you is a fake ego … “a terrible master” the opposition of the “good spirit” … the terrible master controls you via “purity” …
when half of your comment talks about the “me” the “i want” … and the necessaty to shortcut the growth , thats the “terrible master” speaking working on you via the “streben nach reinheit” (pursuit of the purity)
answer me this question ? are you guilty of the condition of the world ?
Are you guilty of crinche takes ?
How could you not have crinche takes first ? how would that even work ? the hole structures of cohersion and control exist because they work. They will teach you wrong shit and dull smugness under a false autority and then will make YOU feel guilty about what THEY have teached you that you went on beliving.
you have to acknoledge the fundamental betrayl that was done to you . not crich about it like some personal failour… its not a personal Failure . It real is not . The “crinche takes” are the result of the totalitarian Enviroment you grew up in. the Asendency from that plane of thought is the triumph.
