I’ve been thinking a lot about the liberal desire to take away features and conveniences of modern life from everyone. Ostensibly, this is to achieve some sort of imagined equity and to beat back the forces of capitalism while ever-so-graciously “saving the planet.” Of course, that the only way they seem to imagine being able to achieve that is by rolling back our lives 50 or 100 years indicates it’s really about something else altogether.
This is just a blog post and as such I will not spend a lot of time building up an extensive case. You are welcome to do your own thinking and research, though I know most of you won’t. However, while insulting my own readers, there is a general lack of understanding in those types in specific and people in general of how systems work, and why their pseudo-solution of “just take away everything” is not one that’d even achieve the goals they pretend to champion. First, their methods of solving the problems that they’ve also misrecognized are themselves reflections and amplifications of capitalistic imperatives because they spring from the Thatcherian TINA. The “removers” are quite incapable of imagining that any system other than capitalism could exist and that such a system could provide the same or nearly the same boons and services that a capitalistic system could supply. This is not by far the only — or perhaps even the main — flaw in their thinking, if thinking it can be called, but it is nevertheless a fatal one. As should be obvious, once you adopt the methods of thought of those you are nominally opposed to, your opposition has already and irreversibly won.
Second, I also made above a little dig that read “if thinking it can be called.” And here I want to expand on that a bit because of course it is not “thinking” as I mean it and as should be meant. Their direction of semi-thought is a version of mood affiliation amplified by identity authentication in internet platforms, but it’s more than that, too. Earlier, I made some quips about the sexual thrill those people get out of the idea of diminishing and debasing other people’s lives. To some that might’ve seemed to have been in jest. But about that, I was and am completely serious. I think the sexual thrill is an enormous part of what they get out of it. Sure, most of them might not be (most of the time) “furiously masturbating” as they ponder how they want to harm others. That part was an exaggeration. However, the way they discuss their ideas about rolling back society and taking away so many good things is very akin to the way new lovers talk about one another — the same semi-obsessive focus, the same repetition of juicy details others are more than tired of hearing, the same non sequitirs. It’s all just right there in evidence.
The harm of course is that these “removers” whip themselves into a frenzy online, just like the January 6 insurrectionists, and then actually cause substantial harm in the real world. I think there is significant risk of this and that is why I am already in my own way working to resist them. A lot of what they are doing of course is just stotting for one another on Twitter or wherever else they congregate. But often, such extremism has consequences outside of Twitter or other internet grottoes. The time to forestall their asinine ideas is now, before they make all of our lives worse than they already have done just by existing.
