| You
Wouldn’t Have To Knock People Off Their Pedestal If You
Didn’t Put Them There In The First Place
By Caitlin
Johnstone
April 20, 2020
"Information
Clearing House"
- Whenever I see someone online repeatedly gushing
with enthusiastic praise about me and my writing, I
don’t get flattered by it. I don’t get any kind of ego
tickle out of it at all; I just quietly say to myself,
“Ah shit. You’re gonna get so pissed off when I
inevitably say something you disagree with.”
And
without fail they always do. It happens over and over
again; someone decides I’m the greatest thing since
sliced bread and decides to elevate me in their minds to
some kind of trustworthy authority figure over what they
should be thinking, then eventually I’ll say say
something they disagree with because I don’t fall neatly
into any reliable ideological box they can trust to
remain predictable from day to day, and they have a
catastrophic meltdown about it online acting like I just
betrayed them.
And in their minds, I did betray them. They trusted
me to always show up in their inbox every day saying
things that align with their worldview in an articulate
and interesting way, and then I betrayed that trust.
It’s not a trust I ever wanted and frequently advise
against, but I haven’t been able to find an effective
way to deter it.
I see this same kind of betrayal reaction from
progressives today about Bernie Sanders and Noam
Chomsky, Sanders for dropping out and endorsing Biden
without first ensuring some “concessions” from his
campaign and Chomsky for sharing the same “lesser evil
voting” policy he’s been voicing for decades.
I personally don’t get this desire progressives feel
to receive “concessions” from the Biden campaign in the
first place. Like, what is the motive here? You want
Biden’s handlers to lie to you and add some more fake
progressive agendas to his platform that have a zero
percent chance of ever being enacted if he makes it to
the White House? It’s so undignified. It’s undignified
for the progressives, and in a sense it’s undignified
for the Biden camp as well. Trying to make a lifelong
corporate whore do a fake leftist song and dance is like
trying to make a cat wear a dress. Stop trying to get
Biden’s handlers to write down some lefty talking points
for him to struggle to read on camera and just let him
campaign honestly as the corporate whore he’s always
been.
And of course the odious Mehdi Hasan
trotted out Chomsky to have him recite his famous
“lesser of two evils” spiel (except of course in this
case it’s the lesser of two right wing dementia patients
who’ve been credibly accused of rape). What did you
think was going to happen? They
did it in 2016, they
did it in 2012, of course they’re going to
do it again. You’ll never see Noam Chomsky more visible
than when the US political establishment needs to keep
national momentum from shifting toward actual leftist
movements.
|
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
|
And I mean I get it. I get it that it’s annoying to
never get to have any heroes who don’t end up betraying
the trust you put in them and advancing causes that you
oppose. Other people get to have heroes; liberals get to
have Obama, conservatives get to have Trump, why don’t
people who want to see meaningful healthy changes in US
policy get to have any heroes?
But in an
environment with vast fortunes poured into upholding and
reinforcing the status quo, where the gravitational pull
of establishment agendas reliably tugs at every corner
of the political universe, that’s just the reality of
our situation: you don’t get to have heroes. The only
trustworthy place you can hang any authority is on
yourself.
If you’re
experiencing emotional suffering over Bernie Sanders or
Tulsi Gabbard for endorsing Biden, or Chomsky for
endorsing lesser-evil voting, you really have nobody to
blame but yourself. You wouldn’t have to knock these
people off the pedestals you put them on if you hadn’t
put them there in the first place. If you’d been placing
authority in yourself, where it belongs, you’d just see
some regular schmucks moving around and saying things
just like all the other seven billion schmucks on this
planet.
You’ve got no
business abdicating your rightful authority over what’s
true to Bernie Sanders, to Noam Chomsky, or to me. Your
responsibility to know the truth about reality is yours
and yours alone. Everyone else is just offering you
various tools. Sometimes they’re the right tool for the
job, sometimes they’re the wrong tool, and it’s up to
you to sort out which is which. But regardless, they’re
only ever handing you tools to do the job that is your
responsibility and yours alone. Take what tools are
useful, and leave the rest. Do this, and you’ll find the
names and faces involved in our collective awakening a
whole lot less frustrating.
For a
supposedly collectivist impulse, the left sure does pour
a lot of mental energy into individuals. “Oh, this
individual is Good, we can trust this one. Oh no, but
this individual over here is Bad!” No they’re not,
they’re just people handing out tools. Sanders handed
out a useful rallying point for the left, Chomsky handed
out some useful ideas on propaganda, and they both
handed out some tools that are unhelpful right now. Take
the useful tools and leave the others. Do this while
standing in your own authority and much of the debate
about individuals will become uninteresting and
meaningless to you.
Putting someone
on a pedestal is actually a very violent thing to do,
because it guarantees that you’ll only have to knock
them off of it eventually. It’s violent towards others,
and it’s violent toward yourself; it only invites future
pain into the world, and the world has enough pain.
Don’t abdicate your authority to anyone else and no one
will ever let you down for using the authority you gave
them incorrectly.
Caitlin's
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https://caitlinjohnstone.com
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