This is not about the many serious issues we face, but about my experiences and the general mindset of the many groups reacting to these issues from the Far Left side of the spectrum
For what reason did I leave the Far Extremes? Why did I leave the Radical Left? Who cares? Well, I care, and so do the people close to me. When you’re deep in the haze of revolutionary fervor blinded by righteous struggle, Far Extremist groups don’t seem far out at all but quite normal. Go too damn far to the Right or too far to the Left, however, and it’s a buncha damn crazy people. They’re obsessed with ideology. They worship symbols as icons. Their ego is inflated with self-righteousness and a distorted sense of history. Their self-confidence is poisoned by a wild, cerebral mix of low self-esteem buttressed by delusions. They focus on what should be, what could have been, what would come to pass, and what ought to be, not on what is actually true and factual.
So many people I encountered among the Far Extremes are paranoid, revel in feeling oppressed, and live in constant, never-ending “struggle.” And the struggle never ever ends. There’s always the next revolution, another group to demonize, another cause to get enraged and bitter over, and even deaths of “those against us” to celebrate. Acceptance is alien. Forgiveness is mocked. Compassion and empathy are absent. Love is conditional, prosperity scorned unless either shared or aggregated, and we’re all expected to march, fight, and struggle. Fight! Fight! Fight! Struggle! Struggle! Struggle! The big, evil “System” is to be overthrown or infiltrated and demolished. Reform is just a mask. The complexity and range of human nature is reduced to a simple “us versus them” mentality. Science becomes religion. Religion becomes science. Economics becomes politics. Imagine what happens when the race up the Tower becomes a race to the bottom…and one breaks on thru the bottom to the other side?
Economics is held up as some kind of holy religion, but few within these cults bother to check the math. Or even apply the math. Instead most just parrot, and they parrot nonsense. If one keeps hearing 2+2=5 long enough, and hearing it spoken as true by so-called credible authorities, and echoed often by one’s peers, then guess what one assumes is true? Why bother to check the charismatic demagogue’s math? Why have the demaguru and all your new cult friends mad at you and angry enough to revile and ostracize you? Hello? History, the interpretations as well as records of people and events, is instead gazed upon as a mess of tea leaves and goat intestines in search of arrows pointing to utopian futures. Go be the future now! Yeah, right.
Radical used to be a cool word. It means to return to one’s roots. We radicals would return to our roots and rebuild the foundations of civilization. We would destroy and wipe clean the earth to rebuild a better world for all. The problem with this thinking is believing the masses, the common folk, the working classes, whatever, regardless of how difficult their lives may be, would prefer instead to live amidst carnage, destruction, and annihilation. Few of those who have endured revolutions and civil wars have any desire to keep reliving such violence, bloodshed, and hatred in the pursuit of justice.
A major reason I left radical activism is I grew tired of ideological rigidity and cultish groupthink. History and actual economics were ignored if they did not fit group ideology. Pragmatism and practicality were scoffed at. Any serious attempt to question and challenge ideological authorities led to demonization, ridicule, and ostracism. Group ideology became group idiocy, altho those within the group failed to recognize it as such. So many so-called radical intelligentsia confused critical thinking with harsh criticism of the Other and the Other’s minions. Critical thinking skills had atrophied inside the groups I experienced. Critical thinking was instead replaced by circular thinking and the babble of confirmation biases.
Ideological rigidity made smart, educated people stupid and stovepiped. I saw it on the Left as well as on the Right. One finds such rigid, ossified thinking within religions as well as politics. It infects all social economic classes, ethnic, gender, and national groups. Ideological rigidity between opposing points of view leads to intensifying polarization. Polarization in turn generates greater rigidity. People grow increasingly isolated within their echo-chamber camps and grow defensive. Eventually they go over to the offensive and assault whomever they demonize. Violence hardens polarization and ideology becomes even more rigid. Compassion, empathy, love, acceptance, forgiveness, and compromise are scorned and stripped away – altho those traits are often given lip service. Stupidity is, unfortunately, and sadly, a common trait of us Homo sapiens. Apparently we humans can be highly intelligent and utterly stupid at the same time. Besides, who in Hell can listen to anyone when everyone is shouting, blaming, and shaming?
There’s so much gaslighting inside radical groups. They turn into cults at war with the rest of the world. These cults split into even smaller and smaller mini-cults and bitterly war with each other. Sometimes they seem more interested in their internecine rivalries than in actually resolving problems. Who represents the working class better? Whose definition of working class is best? Trotsky versus Stalin? Even, yes, Jesus versus Marx. How many revolutionary leaders are highly educated, hail from wealthy families, and thus they think they know better just because? One finds gaslighting within political and business cults as well as in religious ones. I’ve experienced it over and over again, and it took me a while to extricate myself. Oh, yeah, if one dares to call one of these groups a “cult,” they are quick to sue your ass, too. It’s another way stay on top and generate revenue.
When in these groups, they become one’s substitute family and pretend friends. Once you leave, one is dismissed as a traitor who sold out or lacked backbone, stamina, and commitment to the revolution or whatever utopian vision is held up for us to aspire towards. The gaslighting is rigged with guilt trips, shaming, blaming, woulda-shoulda-couldas, demonizing others, and numbing your brain and heart. You turn into a frakken two-legged cow trained to bleat in unison. Somehow two-legged cows and sheep are expected to have a backbone and show a spine and call out every one they disagree with as a horrible person. Chimpanzees, by the way, have superior spines to us humans.
Members are isolated from one’s circle of family and friends. Members are encourage to abandon them if they won’t join you in your networking marketing business, or your radical political movement, or your seriously crazy version of religious groupthink. I remember back when I was briefly in an Amway group we were encouraged to forego birthday parties and holiday celebrations so we could instead be out in the world building our MLM enterprises and “making money.” The leader of another network marketing group I was in briefly along with lots of other broke ass people liked to say, “Money doesn’t make the world go around, but it pays for the trip.” “Money is power,” another group leader said. “Having lots of money gives you the power of choice. You’ll have more freedom!” Many political activist groups and religious organizations ask for money nearly every chance they get. They’re great at manipulating psychology to make people feel guilty for saying no. Those who retreat from the world still need money to generate food, water, shelter, and energy at a certain level.
The leadership doesn’t necessarily tell you to abandon people, just don’t waste your time and energy blah blah blah when you can be doing blaaaah to make lots of money to save the world or donate to the cause to destroy civilization in the name of building utopia upon blood-soaked ruins.
Put downs and demonizations (“Oh, they all voted for the other guy”) run rampant in these tiny, point-of-the-spear vanguard groups. Leaders encourage deflection, ridiculing, put-down language to distract people from facing the what’s-actually-so reality of primary issues to believe a bunch of incendiary hornswoggle instead. Members start second guessing one’s sense of reality. They fall prey to the corrosion of doubt and tumble into pitfalls of comparison. They are gaslit into zombies.
People within these groups feel the social pressure to agree with someone in power to avoid invalidating one’s self. Books are read together so as to be praised for their revolutionary brilliance rather than criticized for any errors and misunderstandings. Education becomes deliberate indoctrination, i.e. re-education.
Beware the whirlpools of radical activism with their charismatic commanders and ideological intoxication. They’re black holes of violent chaos. The moment one disagrees and breaks rank, one is demonized as another enemy. Romantic revolutionaries pave the way with their own sweat, bones, and blood for heartless sociopaths to manipulate perceptions of power.
When you’re in these movements, or “the Movement,” they don’t seem far out at all but quite normal. For aren’t we all normal? You’re normal, right? No, of course not. Normal people care more about sports and movies and raising kids and making money in today’s madcap world. We’re all proudly abnormal, aren’t we? Laughing Out LOUD!
Even when I was active in protests movements and radical Leftist groups, I had to shake my head and roll my eyes when my ideologically rigid comrades voiced OUTRAGE that more people choose to pay money to go to sporting events such as football games instead of marching for free for whatever cause is deemed virtuous and righteous. They couldn’t understand why people get pissed off when they block freeways and prevent motorists with full bladders from going to work, getting home from work, running errands, going to the doctors, and picking up the kids. Or throw gross crap all over art. The sheer stupidity and dumbassery of many of my fellow activists drove me the hell out. And I dare say many others left for the same reasons even if we were otherwise sympathetic to the cause. How do I know? Because many told me so over the years.
Once you’re in, in deep, you may realize, as I eventually did, your movement is the political version of a religious cult headed by messianic people pretending to be “just comrades.” Theories of economics, even speculative hypotheses, are collapsed with facts to buttress a peculiar declaration of what reality is supposed to be. Or should be. Or could be. Or…and shall be! Blighted babble dressed up as glorious revolutionary wisdom!
Hey! Go twiddle some twigs in those radical goat guts and flip over some revolutionary tea leaves splayed upon stone. Yes, go be the future now! Oh yeah, instead of animal intestines and wet leaves, we can use AI now! We’ll have ideologically intelligent coders program really cool algorithms so predictive AI can show us the future like those psychohistorians in Foundation. And how did things turn out for galactic civilization in the Foundation series? Hope you can tell I was being a little sarcastic there, forth wall and all.
This essay began back in 2020 with the following title and subtitles:
A Warning Why I left Radical Left Politics
A Warning to All Who Seek to Destroy to Create
Open Letter to why I quit the Green Party & the Socialist Alternative
Then I refined it to read:
A Warning: Why I left Radical Left Politics
A Warning to all who seek to destroy in order to create
&
Why I quit the Green Party, the Socialist Alternative, & other political groups
Found myself getting so disgusted with the behavior of these groups I found it hard to finish writing why I got the hell out. Plus I was embarrassed. After all, I was the common denominator. My keen sense of social injustice combined with my knowledge of world history, religions, and economics led me down a different path where I felt I fit in better. But I never actually did fit in. Was in numerous groups since childhood. Grew up in the chaos of the 1960s and 70s, after all. Before and after the 1999 Battle of Seattle and the worldwide Anti-Globalization Revolts I was in a number of inspiring, excitable organizations. So many people from so many different walks of life came together in new ways then! The end of the Cold War and the rise of the Internet were ushering in decentralized movements with novel ideas envisioned by Cultural Creatives. World peace and global unity were finally possible. Community, cooperation, and collaboration on such a worldwide and interconnected scale would make our revolutionary dreams a reality.
What followed crushed those movements. The heavy police crackdown on the Anti-Globalization Revolts followed by 9/11 and the expanding Global Long War on Terror along with the rise and normalization of widespread surveillance killed those dreams. Every one of those post-Battle of Seattle groups I was in died out in a plague of disillusionment. The Greens and Socialist Alternative were the last two political groups I got heavily involved in. Watching so many people leave, however, sometimes when the movement seems to be going well, caught my attention. Whenever I asked them what were the reasons they left, they voiced similar reasons already written above as to why.
There was a time in Seattle I volunteered for the Green Party for a couple of election campaigns, one local and one national. Both were in 2000. Later marched with the Greens in Occupy Olympia where in November 2012 we Greens helped a much larger crowd of protestors shut down the State Legislature and barricaded the Democratic Governor in her office. Barack Obama was POTUS then. The Great Recession, as did the Great Depression many decades earlier, drove many people away from Capitalism into Socialism. Then as the promise of Socialism, in this case the version known as Economic Democracy or Democratic Socialism, failed when Capitalism was supposed to be in collapse, a number of embittered people drifted into little-f fascism and the populist Far Right/Alt-Right.
Later, after Occupy and before the rise of Trump, I volunteered with Kshama Sawant and the Socialist Alternative in Seattle. Once I stood up in City Hall before the media and declared myself “a proud member of Socialist Alternative.” I did so as one of a small group of retail workers as we advocated for a higher minimum wage, predictable scheduling, and a union for our co-workers in the company we worked for serving our membership. We won the first two but lost the union push. Wasn’t much enthusiasm among the workers. There was a lot of fear, especially the fear of losing jobs and benefits during Hard Times. The political activists outside those working jobs, however, thrived on Hard Times and had the greatest enthusiasm for what the one thing many workers dreaded to face. Things felt off even as many of us felt grateful for the gains we achieved.
Ironically I left the Greens for SA because the Socialists were better organized, better led, adapted faster, campaigned more effectively, raised more money, and got things done. SA accomplished results. The Greens were decentralized, slow to act, slow to change, slow to fundraise, and waited too late to endorse candidates. My experience in Seattle were many of the Greens, with all due respect, were aging hippie types who liked to sit around and reminisce about marching for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War. They were reluctant to meet more frequently, form action committees, fund raise, and do the busy work of political activism.
SA members lived and breathed Marxism and Trotskyism, denied the bloody history of Lenin, a man bereft of any empathy and compassion whatsoever, and met many times a week, several times a day to generate actionable results. While the Greens were cool and chill, the Socialists were impatient. They were on fire! And fired up! They kept pushing people into their narrow definitions of working class which in turn antagonized many working folks. Both groups engaged in cultish groupthink ringed with circular thinking. One group may be slow and mellow and the other fast and ferocious, but both engaged in gaslighting behaviors and kept busy demonizing the others.
Even so, disgruntled with many of the mainstream Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, I voted for Green Party candidates for President in some of the recent elections. Voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 and Dr. Jill Stein in 2012 and 2016. I disagreed with many of their positions, but they had vision and good character. The Election of 2000 ended up being the so-called Republican Bloodless Coup resulting in the Supreme Court determining George W. Bush to be president even tho he lost the popular vote to Al Gore. In 2016, Hillary Clinton usurped the Democratic nomination from Bernie Sanders, who was an Independent in the first place. Clinton went on to defeat Donald Trump of the Elephants by a huge margin, of about three million votes. Trump, however, intimidated and manipulated the Electoral College, which in failed in its job.
The Electoral College is an anachronism with no redeeming value whatsoever except to a ruling elite of ultrarich conservatives that must be abolished, but that is another story. Trump went on to usurp the electoral process and had himself declared President even tho he clearly, absolutely lost. The Election of 2016 was the last time I voted for a third party candidate for POTUS. Finding out later the extent of Russian interference in that election including having Jill Stein unwittingly played by Vladimir Putin (very different from witless, imbecilic Trump being groomed as an asset over the years by Putin & Gang) also soured me on third party candidates. They are so naive and kumbaya with their embrace of nonviolence and rejection of war and intelligence realpolitik.
Both decisions to leave these two organizations were formulated over time. They were gradual processes. When I became clear, however, I left and left without hesitation. Without even any letter of resignation. Voted with my feet, so to speak. By the time I left I’d thrown my hands up in the air with a mix of frustration, concern, sadness, anger, and disgust buttressed with a level of insider “wokeness.” At the time I felt unable to give voice to any letters. To whom would I write the damn thing to? I liked everyone. Considered many within both parties good friends and acquaintances. The whole global structure is rotten, both groups declared, and the truth, however, is the whole structure includes all groups. We are in it. Yes, we are in it. In it! In a strange way, I was reminded of an old book in my grandmother’s library I read as a child. Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements was published in 1951. Read it about 1970. Left an impression on me I’d forgotten about until I grew disenchanted with these radical mass movements. SA was by far the most cult-like and ultimately fell prey to the “splittism” that affects so many radical organizations on both the Left and the Right. Socialist Alternative ended up alienating many of its members and allies and their power waned and withered away. Fed up and sadly disappointed as well as disillusioned, I left in early 2017.
The Election of 2016 broke the Duopoly that had fractured in 2000 and continues to break down ever since. Polarization has only increased since the whipsaw back ’n’ forths between Republicans and Democrats ever since JFK’s assassination and Nixon’s Watergate scandals. Small third parties love to point to “the Duopoly” of the “Dem-Rep two-headed snake.” It’s often pointed out Democrats and Republicans rotate thru the same revolving doors of power from military and politics to business and academia to secret societies and clubs to the lecture circuit. Yet despite all of their flaws, we can say it would have been a different world if Gore had become President in 2000 or anyone other than Trump in 2016. Both parties are fractured. They have been fragmenting for quite some time. Different factions have come and go including Tea Party Libertarians, New Whigs, Democratic Socialists, the Alt-Right, RINOS, the moderate Dems, NeoCons and NeoLibs, the Rainbow Coalition, and so forth. We are in a major breaking apart and realignment of the two main parties on a scale not seen since the 1840s-60s and the Civil War or the turbulence of the 1950s-60s-70s quasi-revolution/almost-civil war.
Now I am an independent and a contrarian. On many issues, especially social justice and environmental causes, I identify as liberal and progressive. The term democratic socialism used to resonate with me, and as time goes on, less and less. More of a fiscal conservative now. Not on social issues, but on financial and economic issues. Gotta do the math, folks. Yes, I am terrible at math as I have severe dyscalculia, among other neurodevelopment learning disorders, and I can step back and see the big picture, sometimes better than many others, find and follow patterns, and see what works and what doesn’t work. 2+2=4, not 5 and not 6 or 7. On many issues I find myself in the center. On national security and military issues am bit of a hawk. Know too much world history of what actually happened to take black and white sides on many issues. We humans crave simplicity, and the reality is our local-national-global challenges are complex, interlocking wicked problems. The term radical middle is something of a buzzword, but it doesn’t resonate with me. A few issues even leave me baffled and apathetic.
Call me what you want, but I’m done with political parties and their incessant, ugly, nasty factionalism. Americans ignored and continue to ignore the warnings of the Founding Fathers as they deliberately left any mention of political parties out of the U.S. Constitution. They warned us repeatedly to beware of factionalism and the violence of factions. With all the numerous, serious challenges facing our region, nation, and planet, it is ironic the most bipartisan issue in our highly polarized US Congress today is over government transparency and disclosure of UFOs/UAPs and NHIs or Non-Human Intelligences.
To be clear, our country and our species faces a staggering array of significant challenges. These challenges overwhelm us, obviously, as we have yet to generate ways to address and resolve these overlapping wicked problems. What is even worse is we humans fail to work together on a unified, planetary level to much of anything beyond quarreling and squabbling while we blow ourselves up. The sheer stupidity of our paranoid stubbornness to work together is as paralyzing as it is appalling. We should have had a united, democratic Earth republic with a democratic world parliament two, even three centuries ago. We had and have the brains and the technology to do so, but lack the will, the wisdom, and above all the maturity to do so.
Even so, the Far Right and the Far Left with their ideological rigidity, reactive cults, zombie groupthink, and demonization of every one and every group except themselves does not work no matter how brilliant or appealing they believe their visions to be. Those far from the Center are lost in rage, endless struggle, and self-destruction. Those on the Left continue to make excuses for the bloodshed unleashed by Communists regimes and movements that identify with the term socialism. Leftists keep busy trying to clean up and rectify and deny the reality of how Communism functioned in practice. They cringe then snarl or slink away whenever someone points out the term “Nazi” began as a German acronym for the National Socialist German Workers Party, or that the dynastic communist dictatorship of North Korea identifies as Juche (self-reliance) and as socialist.
Ironically, the term socialist is “supposed” to mean one who stands for the expansion of civil and political republican democracy into the workplace, into business, and into the realm of economics and finances. Thus the Americans popularized the term “Democratic Socialism” to distinguish itself from the socialist democracies of Europa with their high taxes and their higher standards of living. These Democratic Socialists also distinguished their movements from the corrupt, “deformed or degenerative workers’ states” such as the USSR and its vassals where the bureaucracy managed totalitarian state control of everything. The early socialist Soviets or true workers’ democracies were actually democratic, even egalitarian, but short-lived and exterminated by the Stalinists. Even now these societies are “moving back” towards capitalism even tho capitalism is supposed to be in a state of collapse.
Capitalism, by the way, founded upon slavery, imperialism, and genocide, has been declared to be in states of collapse since the Industrial Revolution. Capitalism continues to undergo intermittent reforms, state regulatory interventions, religious chastisement, and quasi-mergers with various socialist movements, and despite all the panics, depressions, wars, environmental destruction, and recessions continues to reinvent itself to keep going strong. This does not mean capitalism is “correct and better,” only that it dominates Earth as an economic-political-sociocultural system.
Human technology will continue to change regardless of the Far Extremes. Human culture and civilizations will continue to evolve, assuming we don’t wipe ourselves out. Human belief systems will continue to change, but the underlying psychology of belief will most likely not ever change with the possible exception of genetic and AI intervention. Human nature is shaped by the context of ever changing environments, but our nature itself remains unchanged as the core content. Our nature is primal, animal, and capable of omnicide and cruelty as well as love and empathy. We are at choice to choose what we embrace. At least do the damn math, too.
William Dudley Bass
Monday 13 April 2020
Sunday 16 January 2021
Tuesday 21 December 2021
Friday 11 February 2022
Sunday 5 November 2023
Sunday 19 November 2023
Thursday 28 December 2023
Revised Saturday 30 December 2023
Revised Friday 26 January 2024
Shoreline/Seattle, Washington
USA
Earth
Copyright © 2023, 2024 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.