A high school student who was immensely talented at basketball saw a special education student struggling with behavior issues at recess. He played a game of one on one with him, throwing himself dramatically to the ground to let the other student dribble by, and missing all of his shots with remarkable precision so the ball would rebound directly to his opponent. This turned what could have been a disastrous day into one the other student still references months later. This act of generosity was performed by a young man whose personal hero is Andrew Tate, the unrepentant (alleged) slave owner whose sex crimes were apparently so heinous that even the Romanian government found them to be beyond the pale.
Many might be shocked by this seemingly stark juxtaposition between empathetic behaviors directed towards someone in particularly vulnerable moment and near worship of a cultural figure who represents animosity to those very ideas. However, this shouldn’t even be viewed as contrasting, let alone surprising. This isn’t because Tate is secretly not bad, or because this student’s isn’t secretly not good, but because there has been a distinctly wrong line of thinking that has permeated the political zeitgeist: the personal is political.
Although often incorrectly credited to bell hooks, the phrase dates back to Carol Hanisch, who argued in 1970 that several women’s therapy groups revealed that a wide variety of their personal problems represented the broader political problem of sex based discrimination, stating: “[o]ne of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems.” This was meant to articulate how the home and the treatment of women within the home was reflected the oppressive misogyny that expected women to be the primary providers of unpaid domestic labor. The second part of the quote is often forgotten; it reads: “[t]here are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.” Like the Second Amendment or the Pacific Rim film series, there’s a reason the second half of this quote has been all but obliterated from the collective consciousnesses of those that used the first half.
The idea that the personal is political is now meant to place the burden on the individual, any desire to look systematically has been eradicated. Someone’s politics are representative of who they are as a person, which means that if someone has the right politics they are fundamentally a good person. This idea has become increasingly important as proletarian proximity to the actual mechanisms of power has been eroded. It is not without consequence however. If someone having the right politics makes them good what exactly does having the wrong politics make a person?
The answer is of course self-evident, but it is also apparent in the shape modern political thought and discussion has taken, especially online. Antagonism cannot be expressed in any sort of upward direction, so instead its expressed laterally. Inter-community conflict is such a mainstream feature that every marginalized demographic or leftist organization is described as “toxic” or “filled with in-fighting” to the point where its cliche. Even takes on this very phenomenon are expressed with the same vitriol as takes on on-going genocides. Every issue and all subject matter have been flattened out into something that one must accept or reject.
This isn’t to bemoan logic. Many of these questions, however narrow, however self-obsessed, do have right and wrong answers. Unfortunately, even in those mercifully private or at least somewhat insular conversations that produce coherent thought and understanding never breaks containment, they can’t. The lumpen have been inoculated from recognizing themselves in each other. “There is only me, and the working class individual in front of me who foreign, a fish person of Innsmouth, despite the fact that I am in fact looking into a mirror.”
While this may sound like cause for pessimism, consider the student that started this off. He has consumed, been inundated with, absorbed the most hostile propaganda towards any concept of solidarity with those around him, especially the vulnerable, and yet his instinct directs him otherwise. Ardent theorized that Eichmann was a banal man, and this allowed him to commit intense cruelty, but she omitted that he had the industrial machinery to grant him that power. He was allowed to be a cog in the machine. There are many machines for cruelty that perhaps many students will become cogs for one day, but only because they yearn to belong. Build a machine for mercy though and they will choose it every time.