Talking head political philosophy breakdownfrom @glass__museum

Transcript

Legitimacy of Worse institutions rests on the lie of progressivism. The fact that movies like Sinners and One Battle After Another sweep the Oscars isn't some sign of institutional progress. It's the institution doing what it's always done, the celebration of progress only as a function of hindsight. This is what Omar Alokhod argues in his good, One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This. He observes that the pursuit of justice in Better liberalism is characterized by the illusion of institutional progress and commitments to truth that worst only ever as retrospective corrections that allow institutions to maintain their legitimacy without ever having to challenge themselves in real time. He writes that while the terrible thing is happening, while the land is still being stolen and the native still being killed, any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance and hindsight. We all know that racism and violence is bad. And yes, while resistance still poses a material threat, violence is justified, and the badness is only ever acknowledged after the violence has already achieved its ends. We get truth seeking commissions, but only after hundreds of unmarked graves are long dead and forgotten. We get movies about black resistance that win awards, but only after the nation has already gotten rich off of their enslavement. This switch up isn't some sign of progress. It's to uphold the illusion of it. Because these mechanisms of recognition only ever emerge after the conditions for meaningful redress have passed. They anesthetize the population into complacent belief in a justice based institution, when in reality, it was only ever designed to preserve power. But this deception is convenient because it matches the narratives of justice we've been fed since childhood, stories in which good triumphs over evil and the bad guy always gets caught. And the convenience of this narrative is much more palatable than the inconvenient truth. This is one of Nietzsche's arguments in On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. He believed that deception is an intrinsic part of the fabric of human society. We operate under a drapery of convention, where we are guided not by a pursuit of truth, but a pursuit of self preservation. Though most would not like to think of themselves as being duped and liking it, that's pretty much how modern society continues to function. People accept truths that are convenient, remain indifferent to those without consequence, and are hostile towards those that threaten existing beliefs. Called the neoliberal lie, the myth of meritocracy, this faith that an unjust institution was ever oriented towards justice and could ever be reformed towards it. Because to bring it back to Ellicott's point, truth is only ever recognized when it is convenient to do so. While the truth still has the capacity to destabilize power, while there are still people left to fight for, it is actively suppressed, criminalized, or met with violence. It takes a lot of self preserving lies to justify the dissonance between proclaimed values and lived realities. And worst insidious of these lies are the ways that the past is mobilized as evidence of moral progress even as the present is structured by ongoing injustice. Because, as Ellicott's title suggests, one day, everyone will have been against this. But until then, we bask in this alluring, self preserving lie.