rock starrs

"A lot of lefties acquired their leftism through academia rather than through empathy with other human beings. And it really shows, because the culture of intellectual supremacy—the idea that you can be fundamentally better than someone else because you know better than someone else—is evident in the way that they behave and the way that they interact with other people. Unless we are able to identify and rectify this schism (because it is a fundamental difference in how you are relating to these concepts), we can't effectively move forwards.

Now, the reason for me that this is so important is because that concept of intellectual supremacy—that you can be better than someone else because you know things that they don't—is rooted in a western Eurocentric colonial mindset. And it is typically internalized at such a deep level that it is fully embodied. Meaning people are not consciously aware that they are doing that. That's just their default understanding. So they don't recognize the nature of the problem that they are perpetuating.

It's normally pretty easy to identify these differences in people, because it's the difference between punching down or uplifting. Either you're trying to be better than other people and prove how much better than other people you are, or you're trying to make sure that everyone can be better together.

Now, the thing is, I get it. There is a big, big draw towards feeling better than other people. It feels good. That's literally what it's about. You feel good because you feel better than someone else. But it's something that we need to be constantly addressing and resisting, because it is a fundamental lynchpin piece of the psychological paradigm that we are trying to uproot.

For me, I think the solution centers around humanization of the enemy. We need to be able to look at the billionaire class. We need to be able to look at Israel as a nation. We need to be able to look at the far-right resurgence across the world and ask ourselves: what happened to those people? Why are they doing that? Not just "they're awful, scummy people"—they can be that too, because that's how they're behaving.

But we need to address the recognition of what went wrong. Yeah, it is insane and totally unacceptable to just assume that they are like that from birth, that they were born to be bastards. Doesn't work like that. If you've ever spent any time working with children and been able to actually do a fucking good job of it, you will recognize that no children are born evil. But you should have also been able to have recognized how rapidly pathological mindsets take hold of a child in this society.