Feeling discontent

Question to my Holla Forums friends,

How do you navigate life in a hyper-consumptive/capitalist society while also staying in accordance with your left leaning ideology?

By recognizing the absurd contradictions we see every day

Just keep in touch with your leftist organization of choice. Bonus points for actively supporting the workers' struggle and not eating meat. Although the last one is also lifestylism so fuck you if you do not eat meat.

It's easy, you don't do anything.

A part of being any kind of leftist is realizing that the injustices of the world are the result of the logic of of our system and the forces that maintain it, something well above and beyond the lifestyle choices of a single individual. Attempting to "be the change", to purge the inner capitalist is to both fail to truly understand the problem and to fall back into the very failed liberal individualist ideology that holds the world in thrall and prevents it from making genuine change in the world by redirecting people's energies away from mass action and towards pointless navel gazing.

pretty spooked post all things considered

If anything, this sort of lifestylism is the spook.

lifestylism as a derogatory term is spooked because it makes it out like the way that you live is not important and that the only important thing is some greater narrative

That would be because the way you live is not important and the only important thing is the greater narrative.

...

You clearly don't know what a spook is if you think what I'm talking about is a spook.

In fact, what you're advocating for is directly a spook.

yes, Stirner was famous for his belief that the life of the individual is not important

His point was that the life of the individual was important to the individual, not that it played some kind of essential role in politics.

Interesting take, but what is the greater narrative if not the culmination of a group comprised of individual people?

I feel that logic could be used contextually to stifle any kind of action as it mirrors the lament of 'Why bother? I am just a mere drop of water in a huge ocean'. When in fact the ocean is comprised entirely of drops of water.

Could you tell me more on where to focus energies if not in my own lifestlye?

but most people who get shamed as lifestylists don't believe that either, it's pretty much just liberals who buy into the ethical consumerism meme

I think the point is that changing your own lifestyle only has an effect if everyone else does the same, and if everyone else changes theirs then it doesn't matter whether you change yours or not. "Lifestylism" is based on superrationality (from game theory), and the assumptions of that don't actually hold true in the real world.

Since it's clear that individual choices have almost zero effect, we need to think of smarter ways of influencing the world on a large scale. Look at all the past examples where one person has changed the world. In almost every case they have either been a military leader or an inventor, and out of those two inventors tend to have much larger and longer lasting impacts on the world.

What you must do is come up with some kind of idea or technology which can self-perpetuate and force the world to change out of rational self-interest. If you want people to stop eating animals, develop a way to make vat-grown meat much cheaper than animal-grown meat. If you want workers to stop being exploited, develop a way to profitably replace workers with machines. Those are the kinds of changes which would actually have a significant influence on the world, and as a bonus you probably get to become rich in the process.

The logic of the system that they reside in.

Political mass action.

By realizing that navigating the absurdity of late capitalist existence is a collective experience.

The inventor meme is over-rated. Ideas tend to bubble up to the surface and get invented by several people at once, even though the patent system is winner takes all.
Also most inventions take place in the context of an institution. Standing on the shoulders of giants, and all.

Well yes, I'm not suggesting anyone should try developing a human-level AI from first principles in their shed. It would be far more productive to join either a university or industrial research group and contribute to their work.

Inventing something world-changing requires considerably fewer living people than having a global revolution.

That's true, although I've become disillusioned with technology utopianism.
The amount of resistance against new technology from society is immense.

Example 1: I feel the internet has been subverted both top-down and bottom-up, and in the end produced disappointingly little social change.
Example 2: The arab spring was spun as a triumph of mobile phone technology by the western media, but amounted to nothing.

…and self-driving cars (electric or otherwise) have equal potential for a leftist transport revolution, or dystopian corporate control.

I'd unfortunately have to bet on the latter.

If you thought either the internet or phones would lead to a global revolution, you were misguided. Neither of them fundamentally affect the capitalist mode of production.


A single technology like transportation won't change the world on its own. When almost all labor is automated, then communism is inevitable. Either the revolution succeeds and all living humans end up enjoying communism, or the revolution fails, the proletariat are killed, and all living humans end up enjoying communism.

Trying to go selfsufficient, and trying to consume from mostly small companies.