See, okay, that's one of the things I want to kind of sink my teeth into regarding Sidestep and Herald, who's technically the ONLY politically active Ranger (despite his brimming with both guilelessness and a too many blindspots at this point in the story). Still, he does actively work to implement change, does try to circumvent the shackles of his functions, and helps his peers, especially those he manages to see as systemically underprivileged (see his behaviour towards the LDPD). An Anarchist Sidestep, because they are intensely political, intensely aware of power dynamics within the society they inhabit, and have been TORN free of the positive guileleness they hate in Daniel, present themself as someone who knows what's going on for real and who will, and I quote here, "break the wheel", usher in a new era, change the damn world. And yet they say this type of shit constantly*:
See my point: Sidestep often embodies political anger, which is GOOD and yields result, but they also embody despair, however much justice plays a part into their path--and while their plans fuel them, it's only towards an abstractedness, towards a one-scaled, personal project, and even then only through destruction--not construction, and certainly not ground-level or wider-scaled activism. They rely on the obfuscation that everything they do is a mean to an end, as if revolution WAS an end, instead of a constant progression and a perennial reconstruction.
In the end, they're mired in a similar guilelessness to the one they want to break in Daniel, one that relies on despair rather than idealism, but is still riddled with blindspots. Daniel is in the world, with all the bias that come with it, especially in his position of privilege; Sidestep is too often out of the world, looking at experience through the distorted lens of shortcuts, marginalization, amalgamation (and of course: the noise they hear is deafening). The blinders are on both ways; they just don't hide exactly the same shit. One doesn't exist without the other, which the book drives home even more sharply by constantly paralleling who Sidestep was and who Daniel is, and the middle-points where their experiences and skills intersect, despite very different backgrounds; but yes, as I was saying, idealism and despair cannot exist without the other, just like liberation doesn't exist without community action, and battle without care ethics; or they self-destruct.
Anyway, I feel like Herald's path COULD and might ask--what does that look like, this collision, this similar goal underpinned by contrary means, and how do you find common ground, especially when the two sides have been too-long fuelled and tormented by discredit and tamed anger?
*Case in point: their very twisted rapport to the Regene cause, despite purportedly working to support it in many paths.