From Philosophical Research
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[cr. 2025-03-13T07:38:00Z]
there is a great problem with conceptualizing all progressivism in terms of "anti-prejudice advocacy".
the way people experience advocating for anti-prejudice at the tops of business territories or in highly-educated circles of experts in Congress is very different from the way people experience advocating for anti-prejudice at any kind of regular scale of daily life.
a talk show host can quite easily go around saying "racism? transphobia? do these people think they look good??" without any major consequences, and make it look like presenting "basic decency" and "common sense" is easy, or that going to all the effort to have prejudice is actually harder. for five minutes that talk show host looks like the most legitimate thing ever, and you almost begin to wonder how, when this program is right here, anybody ever Freely Chose to think any other way.
but then you step out into the real world where every individual is surrounded by a Vegeta effect and you realize that above and past the possibility that believing the things people believe was a requirement to receive parenting or socialization and they didn't even Freely Choose to think that way, if you ever ask them to be good people people just don't want to be assed to do it. everyday relationships reveal themselves to be secretly toxic relationships. people who seemed at every other second of every day of the year to be good people turn terrifying. people watch neighborhoods, workplaces, university environments, online forums or creator-Audiences, local businesses, and any number of features of daily life become poisoned with hostility and malice the moment _anyone_ practices basic decency and common sense. before they could eat anybody's faces, the leopards were everywhere, always waiting in the bushes or up a tree for their chance to hunt. society was always more of a dark forest than a welcoming town bazaar or a contract everyone signs; to try to write up various stacks of paper saying leopards formally weren't allowed to pounce wasn't necessarily going to make any outsiders any more eager to enter.
the owners and top experts will never experience the real resistance that real-world people put up every time somebody says something. they have no serious idea what it is like to actually live below the scale of republican politics and Liberal economics and live _within culture_.
when you live within culture, you can make the wrong move and lose anything. the wrong move or the wrong words turn your supposed friends into not your friends. the wrong friends turn your family into not your family and your house into a box on the street. the wrong behaviors or outward expressions turn your wonderful work opportunity into not your workplace, and there is a dreadfully fine line between what can be plausibly argued as unreasonable working conditions and what is simply considered being a bad worker. it is not often easy to tell what relationships are abusive and what ones are considered "healthy". when you live within culture, every relationship seems to come with a long packet of terms and conditions. you search yourself, skimming again through the terms and conditions packet wondering if there is any way you can follow them better to feel less empty and wonder less if you shouldn't be here. but you never necessarily know, because every packet you get is almost as bad as the last. will anybody accept you as yourself? is there any such thing as being yourself? or is every case of being out in society just another fake performance of what you predict other people want? you've been to supposedly "inclusive spaces", and they've just all felt the same as any "non-inclusive" space minus the extra-aggressive leopards. there are still at least a few leopards sleeping on branches in a certain kind of fake peace. you wonder if it's simply your ultimate destiny on earth to be leopard food. ~~you wonder if anybody will ever notice the leopards, but you suspect not.~~ you wonder if your existence in this world is just a fluke, and if a more accurate Christian bible would have read that God made the earth specifically for leopards. you retreat to your lair and try to reconstruct what a normal existence "should" be like by reading or watching fiction. if you're a certain kind of person, maybe you try to reconstruct a reasonable world by _creating_ the fiction. but either way, somebody made that fiction. and that person was probably somebody who lived either above or outside the scale of living in culture and didn't have to constantly experience all the reasons that reality isn't like fiction.
in many ways, society has already fallen away into nothing, and it's only the capitalist owners and secluded experts that are even experiencing life — worse yet, perhaps only _depicting life vicariously_ — while everybody else increasingly just hides from each other.
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[cr. 2025-03-13T13:45:07Z]
yeah
what was really supposed to come out in the "never going to watch" dialogue was this concept that [*nw]
prejudices are really weird, because so much of a person can seemingly have nothing to do with the prejudice
and you want to think that this means the prejudice is a surface level thing that people will easily step out of
but that's not the way it is, and it's almost the reverse way, like the prejudice is the kernel at the center of the person and the other 99% of stuff is a fake front around that kernel that could always change.
and the reason it works that way is people exist materially first before they express themselves or have feelings or do anything else
in existing they experience chunk competition across the spatial slot hierarchy, and then prejudices are generated
and then all of the surface things you initially see about a person happen
