History Will Not Treat Those Sleepwalking Through This Crisis Well
There’s a peculiar form of blindness that comes from prolonged safety. Like a frog in slowly heating water, people who have known only stability become incapable of recognizing existential th…
Just because we go on as normal doesn't mean that we are unaware of what's going on. There's simply literally nothing of any consequence we can do. And tbh at this point, the union is simply not worth saving. It needs to collapse so new better things can rise from the rubble. We're simply at that point before the collapse.
So what do you expect anyone to do about it? Sure, journalists can write and write.
All we have is voting and that is off the table until 2026. If it still exists.
I don't mean to be rude but the call to action of this article is nothing more than "be afraid". Being afraid doesn't stop this.
Historically, just being vocally disapproving is helpful. A huge part of gleichschaltung is normalizing atrocity starting with basic shit before moving into killings.
It's interesting to me how journalists are in general are all heading to the same place and using the same language. We know just how bad this is.
I'm not going to discuss details of what happens in the mod channel, but the frog analogy was there. This is, for lack of a better term, a fucking shitshow. There's so much obvious here that people are missing.
How are those egg prices working out for you?
Egg prices will be lowered... and henceforth carry the risk of Salmonella.
It's because if you don't "biz as usual" with everyone else in the colonies, they kill you. Every law in the colonies and many norms are enforced by a man with a gun. The laws only apply to people who cannot buy their way out of them and they will kill you if you don't play their paper money trading game with them and let them win. They're murderers who have a short-order murder society and they kill people or put them in cages forever when anyone without fiat money doesn't pretend along.
They're the volk.
*edit And it isn't "blindness," their whole society is about this. Half of their television is about their fixation on their "criminal justice" murder-enslavement cult. They think prisons are normal and they send corrections officers to career days for children. Nobody is subtle or hiding what they are about in the colonies. 🤦♂️
Every law in the colonies and many norms are enforced by a man with a gun.
This cuts both ways. Citizens have guns. The problem is that we're too afraid to use them in times of crisis like these, because it's been so long since we've been this pressured to get to that point.
And thus, the people with power will continue to abuse the powerless.
It does but I look at other dictatorships that allow their citizens to own guns like Russia and Nicaragua. They're still entrenched even with guns. The only difference I can see is the towns have defense against paramilitary and aren't dealing with M23. But they're still entrenched.
Genuinely, what is the appropriate word for this?
In history, retrospectively I believe it was a "collaborator". But that to me does not evoke a sense of currency or anticipation of what is to come, which would be more helpful to us now.
Likewise the article suggests "complicit", but I have roughly the same problems with that.
Ultimately this smacks of "those who are not with me are against", which itself is vaguely similar to "the ends justify the means"... which is both obviously true and yet obviously so very not at the same time, presumably the difference lying in the circumstances where each applies or not.
There are people who voted against this. Then there are people who voted for it, but not for what will come as a result. Does it matter, in the end?
Thus I can't quite think of the right word, I guess bc the variations and nuances and subtleties paralyze me there in trying to come up with one. As I imagine is true for the nebulous "them" as well. Not that we should let that stop us, mind you: like Ukrainians fighting off the Russians, perhaps compassion is something that you offer when you can but not at the cost of doing what needs doing in the meantime.
And maybe that's why the word I am looking for is so hard to find: perhaps it doesn't exist at all, except in retrospect?
I don't know the word any more than you do, but a lot of catastrophes in previously-comfortable societies were enabled by a large amount of indifference by the people who if they'd been spurred to action would have been able to stop it.
Solzhenitsyn said that so many times, in the Gulag, he played it over in his head what he and people he knew should have done to resist, but they didn't do much of anything.
You are right of course, so what I say next is on top of rather than instead of that: those people could easily be said to include you and me. Like Bernie Sanders, who devoted his entire long life to fighting this... did he do "enough"? Is AOC doing "enough", by "merely talking"? Obviously Luigi tried, but it didn't work so was it "enough"?
It's so easy to get caught up in what others should or should not have done. What agonizes me these last few days, keeping me up at night, is what I should be doing. Which is not so simple as simply "fight back". If someone is both robbing a home and that house is also on fire, it is not enough to stop the one - you must also stop the other. So like, I'm no climate change researcher, but I can only imagine the hard choices they must face: "should I play along, and try to do something about the climate, or... just resign, or what?" People that do aid work, if they are somehow still there, should they continue to do aid work, bc it helps people who more desperately need it? What about people working inside the system - like tax season is coming up, should they quit or sabotage things so that people don't receive their refunds or what?
Okay so none of this is truly "sleepwalking", but it could look like that, from the outside? Someone making their own determination about whether they did "enough" is one thing - and ofc it's never going to be enough - but I could easily see someone labeling what someone else as done as not being "enough", and it's a slippery slope from there to McCarthyism.
Maybe - probably - I'm not helping here, bc there legit are people who not only are "sleepwalking" but I have actual family members and friends who are outright cheering it on. And no amount of quibbling over whether something is enough is going to compare to actually rooting and even asking for it to happen.
So to me, "sleepwalking" seems both to not go nearly far enough, and also to potentially go too far (in practice if not in theory), and in general it just seems not all that helpful to me to understand things.
As compared to watching such material as e.g. https://youtu.be/uqsBx58GxYY. Which ironically could lead to a charge of sleepwalking itself, bc staring intently into something as it happens is merely another way to excuse oneself from actually doing anything at all about it.
Perhaps Quisling?
That is an interesting word - not "just" another word for collaborator but "Aurally it contrives to suggest something at once slippery and tortuous." - thanks for sharing:-)
