Hi ! I’m lurking through your blog and you seem very mature, like in a way that’s rare to find. I naively had similar beliefs as a teen but now feel like I’m never radical enough or useless, I felt like I lost myself and I wanted to ask how do you stay confident in your mindset.
Old, Anon.
The word you're looking for is old.
Aging is weird.
The truth is that I don't stay confident in my mindset.
I think that's mostly a good thing, because the reflex to defend a mindset can drive you to bypass genuine listening and reconsideration when presented with new information or new ideas.
Mindsets can get tangled up in feelings, fallacies, and cognitive biases.
I try instead to stay open and skeptical, especially of myself. That uncertainty keeps me checking in with my beliefs. It helps me pause before posting, read people I disagree with, and listen when people disagree in good faith.
Maybe you're really asking something deeper, Anon.
You mentioned feeling like you're never radical enough, or that maybe you've lost yourself.
That disorientation, that sense of being not enough for the tribe you're supposed to belong to is real.
It's especially brutal when you actually care about justice...but your community starts measuring morality by loyalty, shibboleths and performed tribal rituals instead of by integrity.
You're not alone in feeling this way.
____
I've been trying to understand what's happening when a wide variety of people get angry at me.
In the past week alone, no shit, I've had each of the following spit at me as contemptuous invective by someone on Tumblr in Replies, Asks, or Reblogs:
Communist!
Liberal!
Centrist!
Nazi!
Boot-licking Fascist!
I've been trying to figure out what it is I'm doing which is so upsetting to so many people across so many ideological camps.
My working hypothesis:
Consistency is a strangely radical trait to display publicly in a polarized society and it is deeply offensive to people on either end of the horseshoe.
Below are moral principles which I think always apply.
These aren't slogans or moral flexes.
I often want to check and re-calibrate my own internal tools for moral navigation, and that's what this sort of thing does for me.
They're guardrails which help me avoid going off the road of human decency or straying from my core moral beliefs. They're also not comprehensive or universal - they're just some examples which are useful and meaningful for me.
Every People Has a Right to Exist
All of them.
You don't have to love every culture. You don't have to endorse every political entity, but no group deserves to be erased.
If your activism involves erasing a people physically, culturally, or symbolically, you're not doing liberation work.
Oppression Doesn't Excuse Oppression
Being hurt doesn't give you a free pass to hurt others. Nothing justifies massacres. Bigotry and violence don't become righteous when they're flipped upside down.
If we cheer atrocities when "our side" commits them, we're not opposing violence, we're promoting it.
Human Rights Are Universal
Women's rights matter in Afghanistan and in the US.
LGBTQ+ rights matter in Iran and in Florida. The right to protest matters in Gaza, Georgia, and Tehran.
Free speech matters even when it protects people you disagree with.
If we bring up human rights to attack our enemies but excuse our allies when they do the same, we're making human rights which should be universal into something selective and tribal.
Targeting Civilians is Never Acceptable
Drone strikes. Suicide bombings. School shootings. Pogroms. Doesn't matter who's doing it or why. Targeting civilians is always wrong.
Moral Agency Applies to Everyone
People and movements must be judged by what they do, not by the story they tell about themselves.
This includes the US, Hamas, Russia, MAGA, antifa, the IDF, radical feminists, the Ayatollah, and your favorite TikToker.
If you treat any group as too victimized to be morally responsible, you're infantilzing and dehumanizing them. It's not compassion, it's condescension.
Oppressed ≠ pure.
Powerful ≠ evil.
The Ends Don't Justify Inhumane Means
If a "revolution" regularly promotes torture, genocide, authoritarianism, or child soldiers...it's not a liberation movement.
If a cause requires mass deception or mass suffering to work, the cause should be revised or abandoned.
"By any means necessary" can go very wrong very quickly and this phrase should not be used often, casually, or as an abdication of moral responsibility.
Peace and Justice Require Listening
You don't build a better future by eradicating your enemies. You build it by figuring out how to share space with people you may never fully agree with.
Justice requires truth and accountability...then forgiveness and coexistence.
When movements start purging dissent, silencing disagreement, and chasing utopias through destruction...that's when they start becoming the thing they claimed to fight.
Right now:
Identity is treated as morality, and power is treated as sin.
Being "on the right side" means never having to check yourself.
Rage/outrage is mistaken for moral clarity.
Empathy is weaponized against an enemy, not leveraged to relieve suffering.
The loudest performers are drowning out those who are working meaningfully and materially for peace.
A large number of us have abandoned consistent principles and ended up cheering for monsters...mostly because the monsters hate the same people we do.
So I try to hold onto moral principles that don't change based on who's in power, or who's claiming victimhood. Moral principles which focus on alleviation of suffering and promotion of justice, not on revenge or the balancing of scales. Principles which prioritize action over performance, and rational universalism over tribalism.
To be clear, I don't think doing this makes me neutral or right.
But I do hope it makes me trustworthy.
---
Anon, if you're feeling lost or like you're not "radical enough," maybe ask yourself:
Are you anxious about being faithful to your values...or just to your group?
Are you sacrificing thought for belonging? Are you sacrificing your own moral principles for social acceptance?
Where did you get the idea that there's some threshold of being "radical enough," and that other people can set that threshold without your consent?
Solidarity without principle isn't justice. It's just one's preferred (or socially acceptable) flavor and direction of selective injustice.
So...what beliefs/principles/values do you hold as sacred no matter what group they're applied to?
---
The quiet moments when you're alone with your conscience are the ones which will tell you who you are.
So don't worry about falling short of perfection, Anon- everyone falls short of that.
And maybe don't worry about falling short of other people's standards either - because it'll never be possible to satisfy them, and you don't owe them a performance or allegiance to their standards.
You owe yourself consistent commitment to your standards.
___
If you feel like you're "never radical enough" or that you've lost yourself somewhere along the way, consider the possibility that you're just experiencing the natural results of trying to be honest and true to yourself in a dishonest, inconsistent, polarized, tribal, performative, reactionary, dangerous time.
Managing that can be difficult and unpleasant, but even just making the attempt takes courage...and you're already working on it.
That's more than most people ever manage.
