I was an angry, anarchist punk taking mushrooms alone in the woods years ago.
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They told me, quite unequivocally, that politics was not what I thought it was, that it was a high stakes life and death game people played, and that treating it as a lifestyle accessory or accessory to personal/tribal identity was wrong.
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This led me to be obsessed with 1) understanding how power works and how people achieve it and 2) having a "correct" normative understanding of what they should be directed to. no. 1 led to a lot of reading of cheesy red pilley stuff, Machiavelli, etc.
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My goal though, was to figure out the correct synthesis and emulate it: the idea of someone who can operate in a very dangerous, evil world but also bend towards the good. Saul Alinsky, Reinhold Niebuhr, this kind of vibe. I got poli sci and law degrees out of this obsession.
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I also failed. But my failure freed me. I eventually realized that the amount of time I spent obsessing over normative political questions was actually stupid for someone with very little actual power. I look at ideological dorks arguing online and I get it. I was once you.
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*But* - believe it or not - we would be better off finding ways to use our creative energies than politics. Have some principles you won't back down on, sure. Render unto Caesar, etc. But most of it is garbage. You are not shaping the Overton window, it is shaping you.
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The people for whom the questions I was struggling with might actually be relevant were not tortured normative theorists, but natural climbers who were building their resumes, running for student councils, etc. They play the game, and any high-falutin pontificating is posture.
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