I don’t know how to put this succinctly, but I read recently about someone feeling like they’re an outsider looking into the world of “normal” people. I feel a bit of the opposite, like I’m a “normal” person just realizing how shit it is to be part of the problems in our world right now-I’d much rather be an outsider to all of it so I couldn’t accept responsibility. I’m just as much of a contributor to everything bad as any other peer in the world. It’s not like I can pinpoint one certain thing I do that makes me feel that way, but I realize how often I judge other people for thinking they’re the perpetrators in everything wrong with society, when I’m not doing anything that differently from the rest of them. It goes the opposite way in that no matter how helpful I think I’m being to contribute to some “greater good,” I still feel I’m doing the bare minimum, and feel culpable in my smallness and ability to enact long lasting in the way I’d like to see the world.
In school we teach physical hygiene. So why not emotional hygiene? Education should include basics of how the mind works, such as the dynamics of our emotions; a healthy regulation of emotional impulse and the cultivation of attention, empathy, and caring; learning to handle conflicts nonviolently; and a sense of oneness with humanity.
As an outsider, I promise the grass is not greener over here. Being part of a community, be that family, friends, or local groups gives you much more ability to affect change. Alone you have no chance of changing even the most local and basic issues.
The best thing you could do is have this conversation offline with the people in your life. You’d be surprised how willing people are to work together towards a larger goal if given some direction and concrete goals.
As one disenfranchised peon to (presumably) another, I feel that the extent to which each of us is part of the problem is the extent to which we are forcibly prevented from becoming anything else. The problem is very profitable, so participating in the problem is made compulsory while organizing to solve the problem is made illegal and dangerous.
I think it is important to keep an eye on your sphere of influence and not take on emotional burdens for things that are far outside of that. Most people are not in a position to make a major impact on the world stage, and that’s ok, but those same people can have a huge impact in their community and with their families.
If you start by refining yourself into a person who stands on a foundation of values, you will be better prepared if you have the opportunity to make serious change. If you don’t get that chance, you will still have intentionally continued to grow into a wiser person than you started as. It’s a win win.
If you do find yourself in the position to do the right thing and influence change at scale, then it is up to you to call on those values and do so. I often think about how there have been so many people who could have changed the course of many global issues, and they bailed on the responsibility.
So I guess my stance boils down to: refine yourself, don’t blame yourself for the things you can’t change, and change the things you can for the better using your best available judgment. That’s all that most people can be asked to do.
And yet you’re thinking about it, a lot more than most people do. Maybe there’s nothing much you can actively do, maybe there is. You’re being hard on yourself when you’ve only just begun the first step, which is thinking about a problem. Give yourself a little time and grace. I will.
We are normal, but normal people like us aren’t the ones constantly trying to ratfuck society to get ahead in politics/business and wield their power to further their greedy personal ambitions, so the odds end up heavily stacked against us. It’s easy to feel like outsiders because that’s the entire strategy, to turn right/wrong upside down, to have a fascist party that tried to steal the election point at Democrats and call them traitors, to takeover the government and defy courts and calls Democrats “lawless”, to take normal sane media like AP and NPR and call it leftist propaganda.
One could argue that anyone paying taxes to the US (or any US-allied states) are “part of the problem” in that they’re partly paying for a state that is dead set on exterminating all life on the planet by accelerating climate change and embracing fascism (or, at the bare minimum, doing nothing major to oppose it). But the people paying those taxes are only doing so under threat of violence, imprisonment, or death. I think anyone who opposes this state of affairs is not part of the problem. They might not be part of the solution, which imo would require engaging in activism to attempt to overthrow the current state of affairs, but they’re neutral at worst. I’d like to think I do enough to fall under the former umbrella, and so would not think of myself as “part of the problem”.
The people who are “part of the problem” in my mind are three groups:
- Those who willingly go along with the fascist project but do not meaningfully contribute to it. In america, these are your typical Trump voters who happily go along with everything he says but aren’t doing anything beyond that. It also includes many liberals who still believe in american exceptionalism and, for example, don’t see anything wrong with committing genocide so long as the person doing it is polite and pretends to be trying to stop it.
- Those who contribute to the fascist project but are following orders. These are the kind of people who will go to Jan 6th, or scream about woke teachers at a schoolboard meeting. They might even run for small-time local office.
- Those who are orchestrating the fascist project. These are the billionaires, high-level politicians, media personalities, and right-wing think tanks who have been actively pushing and/or masterminding the fascist movement for decades.
I think it is a very healthy feeling that you have there. We can all help make this world a better place and people have done so in the past.
It is arguably much easier to just start doing things if you dont have to leave the warmth of the herd. But i think you can do it.
Depending on where you live, you can start by contacting people who volunteer for social projects like soup kitchens etc. You can start reading up on class struggle and politics from a more scientific and less biased perspective, etc.
Feel free to contact me if you need more ideas. Good luck.
Depending on what problems you’re talking about, I think everyone is to blame to some extent. For example global warming is largely due to humans producing more and more energy to keep up progress, and here we are spending it on basically useless discussion.
I think you proved that point extremely well.
Global warming is not about producing more energy, it’s about burning fossil fuels instead of clean energy (renewables, nuclear…) and about wasting energy.
But it’s not as easy, technically everytime you use your car you become “part of the problem”, or everytime you buy some useless single-use crap from temu, but I think it’s unfair to blame yourself for it. The system allows and encourages wastes and “problematic behaviour” because it’s either more profitable (see bigger cars in the US) or changing is more difficult and politically inconvenient.
I somehow feel like an outsider and yet responsible for what’s happening around me.
To a large extent people are just the products of their surroundings. Doing the default thing is an energy saving technique, as well as something which people do to prevent being ostracised by their peers. If you’re able to break that in some small way, you’re still doing better than most.
If you want to do more, I guess you have to interrogate why you’re not doing more. Is it fear of rejection? Fear of failure? Lack of time, energy or resources? Dependency on e.g. cars? Lack of confidence in your actions?
