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by namdnay 2184 days ago
> It's the ones who take that activity and those causes so seriously and extremely that they become personal embodiments of them

Is that really an issue? Looking at our democracies, is the real issue that people take their causes seriously and extremely? Or is the issue the cynical apathy that opposes that?

History is full of pompous self-important people who took their causes very seriously indeed, and advanced humanity through that dedication.

1 comments

The problem seems to be that people are very bad at what the stoics prescribed: do what you can and accept the rest.

I mean there's a very steep diminishing returns curve for most kinds of activism. You can't protest 0-24, because eventually you will run out of food, water, money, etc. Of course social networks and the constant breaking news media pours napalm on everything continuously, just because. (And yes, Trump is going to be Trump every day, just as China will be run by a paranoid oppressive power-hungry regime for the foreseeable future.)

And this kind of overdoing things, not backing down, not compromising, not accepting incremental change even if it costs people a lot what seems to be the problem. (Eg. see how some people unironically think that a big collapse is an acceptable way to get to whatever next glorious stage the world will get to. See also how most far-anything ideologies all operate as very simple recipes and try to derive "solutions" - or maybe they are better called proposals - for every problem they see. And this ideological purism is what SP seems to ridicule with contrived situations, that are allegorical - usually to an almost direct correspondence - to the complexities of reality. )