“Nothing is inevitable,” Solnit says. “I use the word ‘evitable’ often.” It’s a familiar idea, that the far right creates chaos in order to distract and thereby upturn productive change, but Solnit dwells on the mechanics: “Authoritarianism always sees fact and truth as delivered by journalism, by history and by science as rival sources of power. Those are radically democratic things. You can be a king or a commoner, and the rules of gravity are still the same. So they attempt to undermine those things.” The politics of chaotic spectacle, disinformation and outright untruth leaves you endlessly trying to prove gravity, your own priorities derailed. The pattern is similar to that in an abusive relationship: it doesn’t matter what you say, and it doesn’t matter whether or not gravity exists. The purpose is to lock you into the engagement so that it becomes your reality.
. . . “I often quote my friend Bill McKibben [the environmentalist]. We were sitting on a concrete floor at an activist space during the Paris climate treaty process [the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015]. Somebody walked up and asked him a question he gets asked all the time. ‘What’s the best thing I can do as an individual?’ He said, ‘Stop being an individual.’ You may have your own quirky playlist and eye-makeup techniques, but you also have this solidarity. When you act, you act with others.”
‘What’s the best thing I can do as an individual?’ He said, ‘Stop being an individual.’
That’s something else authoritarians cannot understand or tolerate. It creates power where there was none before, and that is a danger to those in power.
People helping each other just because they can is an utterly alien concept to many on the right, who mostly seem to see aid or assistance as something transactional, where you only do it if there is a direct benefit to you personally. This makes them deeply suspicious of any group that actually works together.
Combine throttled to non-existent critical thinking skills, normalized and profitable narcissistic and Machiavellian behaviors and a zero-sum based just world perspective and you get these ‘individuals’ lapping up the hollow authoritarianism we are dealing with today.
As you said, they cannot understand why anyone would do anything for someone else unless they benefited directly. It is a transactional mindset due to the traits mentioned above, and it explains why they also can’t tolerate the idea that anyone else should get help to achieve the goals/material items they’ve achieved/obtained themselves. They truly believe that someone else’s gain comes at a cost to them. Student loan forgiveness, reproductive rights, and every government funded social program are examples.
It is a mindset trapped in binary thinking with no tolerance, recognition, and acceptance of nuance or context. ‘Facts don’t care about your feelings’ lays it bare.
It tickles that “tribal” nerve when encountering things foreign and alien to one’s own sensibilities. This is probably the biggest capitalizing opportunity in existence.
I once was getting carpooled to an event I like to go to, and I brought two bags of groceries with me. The driver asked what was up with them and when I explained they were for a friend who was currently unemployed, he was like “you’re not going to be paid back for that”. Missing that not being paid back was part of the entire point. I don’t want to see my friend be hungry. Maybe I can’t feed my whole neighborhood, but I can feed one person and that still makes a difference.
