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I think this explains it well

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But, I guess if I were to try to rephrase it, the slavishness of my comrades enslaves me; I cannot be free, not truly, if I cannot meet another on equal terms, if I am predispositions as lesser or greater, then I am bound to these roles, defined by them, defining others, rather than free from these fetters.

The enslavement of others, their material and mental degradation and stunted development, disallows them from engaging me in fruitful competition; I can't learn from them if they can't teach me, if they can't develop themselves to the fullest extent possible, then they can't challenge me in meaningful discourse;

My individuality is possible through the past and present efforts of others, this is why the anti-abortionist critique fails when it talks about "The Next Einstein" or whatever, because there's people now, in poverty, now, who due to systemic conditions are disallowed from developing their powers; in a sense, depriving me from their example.

i think this is a pretty big failure mode of pre-university math education. in tutoring, i used to encounter people who knew how to do certain operations but not why, because they were tested on the "how" and not the "why", and for one reason or another they lacked the natural interest in math to seek out the "why".

sidenote: i think one of the major reasons people lose interest in math, stop asking about the "why", and start treating doing math as a chore is precisely this style of teaching.

proof-based math tends to be the opposite of this. symbolic manipulation is still useful and essential, but finding the correct manipulations requires a certain level of deeper understanding.

as many engineers will point out, proof-based math isn't really essential for many people, even people who use math frequently in their jobs! you can get away with just knowing a few rules most of the time. but i think deeper understanding is useful, both because it gives you greater flexibility (you can adapt a limited toolset more ably) and as a failsafe (detecting errors by noticing your answers run against your intuition).

What Do You Think You’re Doing? by Kaiser Caimo

Part 3 of 4.

(Part 1 here)

For example, anarchists tend to have a value system which says that hierarchies and systems of domination are inherently unethical. This is something I agree with very strongly, and is why I often describe myself as an anarchist. A common question then posed to anarchists is how, without hierarchy, bureaucracy, or other such systems of social control/management, it would be possible to achieve the large-scale coordination needed to accomplish certain tasks that are considered necessary for human flourishing: industrial-scale production of antibiotics and vaccines, management of carbon emissions, maintenance of a power grid, and basically anything else that requires a sustained, large-scale and legible set of social processes. Rather than addressing these (in my view) very valid concerns, most anarchists respond by dismissing the question. They claim, for example, that without capitalism we would have no need to manage carbon emissions, because the market incentives to emit would be gone. Or that industrial production of medical supplies isn't really necessary, because sufficient quantities could easily be made by small-scale local producers, etc.

And I'm always tempted to say "wow, how incredibly convenient". We don't even have enough understanding of human psychology to successfully model human behavior in our own society, and yet you're absolutely sure that in your hypothetical future society, humanity would just... no longer have any desire to engage in high-emission activities? You're absolutely sure that the physics and biology and chemistry and engineering involved in medical production all just happen to work out to make small-scale manufacture consistently doable? You're absolutely sure that all these problems people are posing just happen to be non-problems?

You may be right, certainly. It would be lovely if these things all worked out to be non-problems. But that's not something that can be determined through political theory. It's something that can only be determined through rigorous empirical study and technical work, and the conclusions that work comes to might just not turn out to be very convenient ones. This is why I sometimes don't call myself an anarchist.

But either way, my values stay unchanged. No matter what the answers to these technical questions are, I remain absolutely steadfast in my belief that systems of hierarchy and control are deeply unjust things. Either way, I will continue (as much as I can) to work towards a society in which these things can be done away with to the greatest degree possible, and their deleterious effects can be mitigated wherever they remain. And I think that I'm far more able to actually do that for being honest with myself about what the challenges of this project really are.

I want to be clear, this is not just a tendency I find with anarchists. I've encountered people of basically every political ideology engaging in this sort of dismissive optimism, insisting that the questions raised by their value system in fact demand no answers. But ultimately, it's not intellectually honest to insist that the universe has conspired to make your value system an easy one to hold. And that kind of intellectual dishonesty actually gets in the way of successfully working towards realization of the values you have.

when we are attuned to our body’s need for rest, we are much more aware of the violence of even the 40 hour work week (ofc work is far more violent than that)

when we carve out our own permission to accept our body’s natural weight set point, demands that we shrink our personality, our voice, or our emotions in order not to cause social offense feel like much less acceptable constrictions

when we learn to value our natural hair and skin, and give up harmful rituals like chemical straightening or lightening (or the beliefs that underlie them), other ways in which we are required to harm ourselves–from a coerced gender presentation to living with the consequences of environmental racism–come into clearer focus as specifically targeted violence 

when we have compassion for our bodies and their vulnerability, we are more sensitive to mistreatment in personal relationships