Politics is pervading every aspect of our experience of life on this planet. Our only volition is in what we choose to do about this inescapable reality.
Reading by Tim Foley:
Saying “I’m not into politics” is just saying “I support status quo politics.” It’s saying you endorse all the violence, exploitation, ecocide and abuse of the current order.
Politics are always happening all around you in every moment of every day, whether you are “into” it or not. Everything you do in your everyday life is pervasively shaped by local and national laws, by economic systems, by oligarchy, by propaganda, by war, by militarism, by imperialist extraction, by government regulations and the lack thereof. Saying you don’t feel like paying attention to these factors is just saying you’re fine with the way they are presently happening.
It’s like if every time a family sat down to a meal the son took all the daughter’s food and the parents did nothing about it, saying “I’m not into politics” whenever the issue came up. The daughter would conclude that her parents were fine with her brother’s behavior, and that they did not care about her as a person. And she would be correct. Their inaction and indifference would be just as consequential as any actions they might take, and just as revealing of their personal character.
Politics are always happening to you. You have no say in this. The only thing you get a say in is what actions you will take to change the way they are happening.
“I don’t do politics.”
Okay well politics is doing you.
Those products you use didn’t create themselves and bring themselves to your home.
Your boss doesn’t pay you overtime and give you weekends off because he loves you.
The technology you use to transport yourself doesn’t look the way it looks by accident.
Healthcare and education don’t cost you what they cost you by some fluke of nature.
The summers aren’t getting hotter because the sun is getting closer, and the reason you’re seeing fewer insects than you saw when you were a child is not because the bugs committed suicide.
Every part of your life is dramatically affected by the political actions of others. Your political inaction is an action, and it’s an action in favor of the political status quo.
“I don’t do politics” means I support genocide. It means I support war. It means I support injustice and exploitation. It means I support ordinary people getting poorer and sicker while the biosphere dies and the billionaires turn into trillionaires. It means I support our headlong plunge into mass extinction and dystopia.
The other day a popular leftish YouTuber made a post asking why leftists are always slamming her as a genocidal Zionist when she’s never explicitly supported the genocide in Gaza. I wound up telling her, “People see you as pro-genocide because you are far from sufficiently anti-genocide in a political environment where being anti-genocide is of utmost importance to people of conscience. I am a left-wing political commentator, and if I had spent three years de-emphasizing and dismissing the Gaza holocaust I am 100% certain that many leftists would be hounding me about it to this day, even if I made the occasional tweet saying Benjamin Netanyahu is bad. People would see my output as not reflecting the urgency of the issue at hand, and they would criticize me as unacceptably sympathetic to the forces giving rise to the genocide.”
Inaction is an action, and when things are profoundly unjust, it’s an action in support of injustice. If your house is burning and you don’t take action to remove yourself and your loved ones from danger, your inaction isn’t neutral. Your decision not to act is itself an action of immense consequence.
That’s the boat we’re all in right now. Politics is pervading every aspect of our experience of life on this planet. Our only volition is in what we choose to do about this inescapable reality.
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