if you want to take the more radical forms of direct action while still staying relatively safe yourself, you need broad popular support.
Yesterday you said you needed a good idea to gum up the works.
Is it a transcendental condition of a “medium-term world you’d wish to live in” that the majority wisely chose it?
If it is then I can understand why you, specifically, would be in need. My friend is a philosophy professor seemingly stuck in an endless loop of mediocrity mucking with this. It’s contrary to the vast majority of human history, perhaps some divine fallacy and privilege difficult to rationalize today.
But, if you’ve rationalized that a minority will choose wisely and another minority will choose correctly but not wisely, then I think you don’t need broad popular support and good ideas. That’s what happens afterwards. Today, we need to be better than popular and good.
Cowardice asks the question - is it safe?
Expediency asks the question - is it politic?
Vanity asks the question - is it popular?
But conscience asks the question - is it right?
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.
What do you need to make a difference?
Is it a transcendental condition of a “medium-term world you’d wish to live in” that the majority wisely chose it?
What an amazing question. God bless you and everything around you that is supportive of you.
Right now the answer is yes. I am too weak (and likely insufficiently knowledgeable) now to create my own justice for myself. So yes I need support. A lot of support.
But even when I won’t need the support, as best as I can figure myself out now, I still prefer the aesthetics of camaraderie over the aesthetics of me walking over a pile of corpses.
Bottom line, I need at least a few friends who fully understand and support me and my interests, no matter what. I enjoy spending time in solitude but I don’t want to be absolutely alone, no matter what, even if I had all the power.
I am in training right now. I won’t always be as dumb and as weak as I am now.
But, if you’ve rationalized that a minority will choose wisely and another minority will choose correctly but not wisely, then I think you don’t need broad popular support and good ideas. That’s what happens afterwards. Today, we need to be better than popular and good.
I don’t disagree.
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.
I am a treasure of my own world. And to me you are also a precious treasure. I want neither of us to sacrifice too soon, but let us make our own wisest decisions. Power without wisdom is blind. Wisdom without power is impotent. Let it be so.
I’ll stop fucking around then.
Corpses? Proton Mail.
There’s so much more possible before the one set of idiots or another makes a bloody mess inevitable. Your merit assigns responsibility, our situation urgency. Please, get to in-person group study Capital, where you will excel. Then, accept the offer to a small team with operational security.
I do not think that life will change for the better without an assault on the Establishment, which goes on exploiting the wretched of the earth. This belief lies at the heart of the concept of revolutionary suicide. Thus it is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions. This possibility is important, because much in human existence is based upon hope without any real understanding of the odds. Indeed, we are all—Black and white alike—ill in the same way, mortally ill. But before we die, how shall we live? I say with hope and dignity; and if premature death is the result, that death has a meaning reactionary suicide can never have. It is the price of self-respect.
Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death. We will have to be driven out with a stick.
