Ideologies are just analogies, not the truth

The left wing has currently decided that the way to protect its adherence is to eliminate criticism from within because it creates an unsafe atmosphere, but as soon as you stop integrating criticism into your own process, you are headed to authoritarianism and the left is just as capable of that as the right. The reasoning is that the elite has all the power and the left wing wants to drive the elite out for the sake of equality. Then power corrupts them and they become the elite themselves, despite them saying they are working on behalf of the people. Currently, if you are any other political color besides a radical, like white supremacists or college socialists, you are inhibited from any public criticism.

The idea of thought technology is very important to employ right now. Every single one of those different ideologies, even those close to us, are just ideologies, analogies, attempts to describe, not the truth of the matter. Intersectionality on college campuses and the progressive left, is the political ideology, the descriptive analogy for power and privilege, saying that reality is not what it seems, but a historic and wide-reaching global age-old struggle for control of resources and struggle for access. The elite controls it, the mass deserves it and they are pitted against in a struggle and marxist understanding of history. A lot of Marx's theory resonates with us and seems to be a good descriptor of certain relationships, but it just a way of seeing and young people have a hard time to question that narrative at all, certainly some of the conclusions drawn about what your responsibility is to work on behalf of other people.

You cannot point to any political ideology and say "This is true and everything else is false". Reality is very complicated and remember: All of this is just people attempting to describe an idea, but 25 years later we might find out it was a really bad way and we will switch gears. People argue from a position of total confidence, but they have not really thought about it much and they have not investigated the history or the facts that contradict it. It is always dangerous when this happens, but that is our moment right now.

Ideologies accusing the president

One example: For seven years, people were convinced that Obama was a secret muslim and wanted to implement Sharia law in the US. We roll our eyes at them, but hundreds of thousands believed that emphatically and were making decisions based on that was the truth. Now people believe that Trump wants to put people in camps, and we all know what that means! Our obligation as opposition is to fight a president who is explicitly building camps for muslims and people he disagrees with politically, but if you think about it: It is not a thing, it is only to make people feel crazy, but there will be people on the left acting as though the prospect of internment camps is on our immediate plate.

But if you say to people that Trump is not planning any internment camps, they will accuse you of sympathizing with Trump and because they say Trump is a nazi, they will accuse you of sympathizing with the nazis. The problem with the Internet is that it costs nothing to accuse someone, while in real life, it does costs something by looking somebody in the eyes and saying it to their face, but on the Internet there is no obligation of being reasonable.

There is still a place for reason and looking at the actual facts and making your own choices irrespective of who is going to yell at you for them.

Everybody is a victim

There is a dark vein running throughout human history where people get in a denunciation mode, lose control of themselves or declare someone as a witch, but nothing good ever comes from feeling empowered by the lynch mentality of a mob. You don't perceive your own violence as assaultive when you feel assaulted or insecure, but because you are under siege, you perceive your own violence as a defensive reply. The prime mover of stride or even war is that internal monolog to justify aggressive, violent, assaultive action and both parties in a conflict feel that they are the victim almost every time.

When we hear that language of victimhood spoken by capitalists, property owners and so forth, we see it as cynical, but part of developing sympathy for others is to realize that everybody has a bad day all the time. We are feeling like the victim right now! What does that serve us other than being a precursor to justifying behaving in a way we wouldn't otherwise do? To what degree are any of us really victims? There is not a single person in the world that is exclusively a victim! In every situation, question yourself first, ask yourself "Am I really right? Is there even such a thing as the class of people that I place myself squarely within?" That is really empowering!

Intellectualism is not winning the masses

During John's informative years progress felt inevitable, and that did not only mean increasing the speed of the computers, get clean water to the people, decrease the infant mortality rate, a moon base, electricity or something. No, progress was the gradual secularization of the world, an idea that had been around since the greeks and before. As people will get more and more educated, you will arrive at a nation of philosophers, kings and queens. People will get less superstitious, less conservative and intellectualism will be inevitable: The dreams of the elites! John subscribed to the notion that there will be a gradual decline of things that inhibited human life. Authoritarianism and orthodoxy in favor or pluralism and open-mindedness. But anti-intellectualism was creeping in unceremoniously and the intellectuals made the language of their work unintelligable to normal people, did not stop criticizing popular culture and turned the academy into a ouroboros or a human centipede. Fun went out of secular life. People go to church less, but that did not stop them for being bigots, they just became bigger assholes. Intellectuals have largely abandoned a world of ideas and made them more insufferable.

During John's college years, a good teacher would leave their students with less certainty than what they came with. The point of college was to get more confused, not less. If you are confused, you are not strident. But at some point, they started to professionalize the literature department and people wanted to come out of college knowing the truth. There is no place anymore for people who are not card-carrying members of anything. The lack of membership-cars is becoming suspicious to people, even more suspicious than carrying the card of their opposition.

Running for office

When John ran for office in 2015 (Main story), he heard from others that the reason people were scared of him was because people didn't know what he was gonna do, and that is the last thing anybody wants. Nobody will elect you if they don't know what you will vote for. John was very appalled by that because he was imagining that if an issue comes up, it would be better if there would be 9 people on the council that will consider it and think about it, instead of just knowing from the title already what everybody will vote. But that is unfortunately the way the system works.