If you see yourself in any of these words take time to reflect before you respond. Especially be mindful that what matters is not our intent but the impact we have and whether we are accountable for that if things don’t go the way we’d hoped they would and we end up causing somebody harm.
People who are worth investing into relationships with understand that they need to be willing to admit when they are wrong, especially if they feel defensive, because someone they care about is trying to show them the error in their thinking. We all make mistakes and it doesn’t make us weak to admit that.
It is egocentric and reactionary to stand firm on ideas that you have been shown are erroneous but because you don’t like admitting you were wrong, since it makes you feel vulnerable and you don’t have the emotional capacity to cope with that. Hey friend, I’m sincerely here to tell you that it did not come natural to any of us trying to recondition our brains and behavior to become more cooperative and compassionate either! And none of us are perfect at it. We’ve all been traumatized by capitalism and it’s corrupt values. But those of us who’ve been working on it for a while now often share information like this to try and get you to reflect on it in light of your own ideas and behaviors.
It is a humbling process, but I promise you it’s worth the emotional labor to improve yourself so that we are better equipped to work together in our communities to try and survive together through the ecological and economic upheaval we collectively face.
It is difficult to imagine mutual aid groups enjoying long-term success in their work if the individuals within have not yet begun working to identify imperialist indoctrination in themselves with the help of those closest to them doing the same kind of work. Mutual aid and other community led efforts often do not last in the long run due to individualistic, imperialist values creating friction or being exploited by agent provocateurs. This is why it is vital for us all to be working on ourselves and instead of living in our primitive hindbrains, always in fight or flight, freeze or appease mode, which only benefits imperialists, we need to shift up into the more advanced forebrain and stop being so easily manipulated by the ruling class.
We are all in different places as we work on decolonizing and decapitalizing our minds, so we can think outside of the bullshit hegemony constraints they’ve conditioned into every aspect of our lives. So if a comrade who is being harmed tells us it is harming them, we need to not allow our biases and fragile ego do ventriloquism with our skull. That’s letting the hind brain react instead of letting the forebrain respond with more stimuli to evaluate and ability to assess the risks the hind brain is squealing about. The capitalist ruling class has conditioned us with their own values to always try to have the upper hand in all of our social relations. It’s one of the things that keeps the working classes divided. So if you’re not ready to let that go, you’re not actually that revolutionary.
If you’d like some revolutionary reading recommendations personalized to you, please ask in comments. Let me know if you have a preference on length of the reading in terms of an online article, a book either in print or available to read electronically online, with some of the latter being free, an audiobook available for free on YouTube, and if you have any preferences on fiction or nonfiction. I’ll try to go from things I’ve read already or things I have that are on my own reading list.
