[zbentley]

The "soldier" metaphor was unfortunate, but I think the underlying thesis is well taken.

We live in a deeply interconnected world. Most actions, even studied inaction/uninvolvedness, have repercussions on lots of other people--complex repercussions that have to do with privilege and affluence and race and gender and all those other hot-button issues that people get up in arms about. We call that "political".

Now, nobody's making you be an activist (someone who puts a ton of time towards advancing one of those causes). Nobody's making you care. You're free to do whatever you want. But choosing not to care doesn't make the repercussions of your choices any less political.

It weirds me out when people get prickly in response to that pointing out that basic reality, because it sounds very much like "I don't want to acknowledge that my actions have wide reaching consequences."

What you should/shouldn't do about that reality is a separate question: opinions range from "don't tell anyone what to do" to "sell all your belongings in service to $cause right now". But accepting that basically everything we do in an interdependent society is not just tangentially but fundamentally political (yes, even refraining from discussing political topics at work) isn't a super contentious or extreme claim.

[MFLoon]

I agree that the world is a complex system, but I don't actually agree that all or most of my actions as a private individual have wide reaching consequences. If you're below a certain critical threshold of wealth, power, social influence or some combination thereof, it really just doesn't matter what you do, it's the law of large numbers. The butterfly effect is a rare exception in complex systems, not a regularity - COVID Patient 0, for example, took actions that had wide reaching consequences, but I wouldn't consider those actions to have been "fundamentally political". Both the impact and the opportunity cost of the vast majority of my actions or inactions, on the greater world, is close to zero. People trying to convince you that "you can make a difference" in your everyday life as a private citizen by voting, recycling, showing up at the protest, boycotting the right products, etc, are in fact lying - they can, potentially, make a difference by causing a wide enough cross-section of a population to change their behaviors, but you the individual are not acting with wide reaching consequences, you are simply shuffling between indifferent behavioral cohorts which will continue to exist in the same proportions regardless of your individual choices.

[AmericanChopper]

At very best, the claim is pointless. In order to live up to that standard, you would have to consider the interests of all people (both living and yet to be born), every time you made any decision. Even if you narrow the scope of those interests to down to only those relating to justice, you’re still left with fundamentally impossible proposition (and even if you were omnipresent, you’re still going to need to neglect some injustices, in cases where the judicial interests of two parties are at odds).

Nobody takes that position because they’re concerned that you’re not considering the injustices some random far away people, that neither of you know about, are currently experiencing. People only take that position when they want to bully/guilt/coerce/intimidate others into caring about the same issues as they do.

If taking no action against an injustice is equivalent to supporting it, then the history of humanity has been comprised entirely of absolutely despicable people. Because for every injustice that you have taken a stand against, there is an essentially unlimited number of additional injustices that you have fully supported by virtue of never even knowing they occurred.

[zbentley]

This is an example of conflating the two things I talked about: acknowledging that almost all actions are fundamentally political, and talking about imperatives.

The reality is that actions have political consequences. You interpreted that as a requirement to track every possible consequence of your actions. That's a deeply false dichotomy, and is commonly used by people to avoid having to confront discomfort from the more immediate political consequences of their actions: "you're saying I have to worry about everything that might possibly happen as a result of what I do?!".

Nobody's insisting on that. That's a cop-out that allows people to say they're "apolitical" when what they really mean is "apathetic to the political consequences of their actions". Which is fine, sure, but, per the original comment, it's a bad look to not acknowledge that there are consequences when what you mean is that you are not interested in them.

What the "everything is political" folks (and the social justice folks, and the BLM folks, and unions, and environmentalists, and missionaries to a lesser extent, etc.) are saying is that you should care about a given set of specific consequences of your actions.

Whether you choose to agree to learn/care about some of those specific consequences, or none of them, is up to you. Whether you choose to associate morality with action/inaction (i.e. the difference between "taking no action against an injustice is equivalent to actively supporting it" and "taking no action against an injustice is equivalent to allowing it/passively supporting it") is up to you.

Like, there are plenty of things I don't give a shit about. Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn't. But I don't for a minute pretend that the fact that I don't care about those things means my actions don't affect them in potentially extremely influential ways. Denying that is Bugblatter Beast of Traal[1] logic.

1. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/24779-a-towel-the-hitchhike...