Comradeship // Freechat

There's a saying, "The watched pot never boils." This idea that if you are watching something happen especially closely, it can seem like it's taking forever to occur. The interesting thing about it if you take it literally, is that the problem with watching a pot boil isn't so much that watching gradual change occur is boring, it's that for most of the process, there's not much of anything to observe with your senses, so it seems like nothing is happening. Then, when it reaches the boiling pot, it seems like suddenly a major change has occurred, almost as if out of nowhere, if you didn't know the heat was gradually increasing the temperature.

Similar to this quote:

Every revolution is impossible before it happens; and then it was inevitable

What makes the difference is in what information you have. If you could monitor the process in detail at every stage, it would not seem impossible and would seem at least somewhat predictable when it occurs.

It's easy to develop a depressed lens of monitoring based on the most horrific events happening. We get exposed to a lot of it, especially when newer to this stuff, but even if not new to it, you still can, whether it's viewing it from afar or literally living through some of the worst of it. But everything has consequences and the most complete lens you can muster will include horrors and wonders, tragedy and serendipity, and anywhere between. The best we're ever getting is a lens. The totality of it would be impossible to comprehend or keep track of on an ongoing basis. So the question, then, is not which is the most total, complete, and accurate lens, because that's like trying to memorize every word in a new language no matter how obscure when even native speakers don't use a large chunk of words most of the time. The question is more, which is the lens that is most effective and accurate for the occasion. We don't want to lie to ourselves or obfuscate suffering as one might do with toxic positivity, but at the same time, we don't want to downplay achievements or re-frame happiness as imminent disaster either.

In other words, making bias conscious and embracing it. Not for the purpose of obfuscating truth or knowledge, but for the purpose of practical navigation of what the circumstances are. A working class bias in the context of a communal, classless society that predates feudalism and capitalism might get you looked at like you have five heads. "What is this 'working class' you speak of?" But in the context of a capitalist society, it makes perfect sense and is a choice of allegiance as contrasted with a bias toward the capitalist overlords. And it can be like this with being anti-imperialist and anti-colonial as well.

I will go back to an analogy someone once used in a talk about "wrongness" and the experience of being wrong. They talked of how in a Looney Tunes cartoon, the character runs off a cliff, but stays in mid-air; they don't fall. It's only until they look around and realize that they are in the air that gravity takes effect. It is like this with wrongness, as they explained, in that being wrong feels like being right. And this can be applied to revolutionary thinking and awareness, in particular for those who weren't aware for a long time and now are. The monster was there the entire time the person wasn't aware, yet their perspective did not perceive it as being there and so did not have the same lens. Once they understand it to be there, it looms over them, casting its shadow everywhere. An impossible to overcome shoggoth of a monster. How terrifying and inhuman. How far its reach.

And yet, it's still only a lens. The shoggoth's tentacles decay with time, its internal mechanisms age, without maintenance it begins to fall apart. The grotesque vision of it has components that can be examined in turn, with many interlocking dependencies. And it's not magic, but made of observable characteristics by human beings with various limitations and is maintained through the means of those characteristics and the resulting action.

The lens can be many things. The liberal individualist might tell you to see history as cyclical and inevitable, and thus to bury your head in the sand. The vomitous chud might tell you some patriarchal garbage about it being "made by great men". We turn to dialectical and historical materialism as a lens, and through it, take on a lens that can navigate both the granularity of struggle and the big picture; a view, like a scientist, that can be repeatedly and empirically observed by different people from different places. Through this, we develop theory and through the testing of theory, we develop practice, and vice-versa. This takes on both ends of the issue of getting stuck in a confining lens; the end of getting stuck in doing the same thing with no idea if or whether or why it's making a difference or not, and the end of getting stuck in believing the same thing with no idea if or whether or why it's worth believing in.

It doesn't bring completeness, but it helps bring clarity for the context. This might feel kind of roundabout to the point, but what I'm trying to get at here is, I encourage people to think about the lens itself. Not to get tied up in some kind of meta existential absurdity, but to recognize that the lens is part of the system itself, as are the mechanisms that help create and reinforce that lens. Part of changing perspectives is being able to utilize the lens for the conscious bias we have taken on, such as for an anti-colonial struggle. Feel what you need to feel and then think about how to turn the lens of the shoggoth's tentacles into one that can expose its weak points.