I tend to do a lot of things for reasons which are unclear to me, but which become clear in time.
There is, in my view, a profound difference between seeing dichotomies in your mind as structures–as for example “power structures” or “structural racism”–and directions.
In the first case, they are static. One knows that, in theory, the people involved in these structures, who operate them, who turn the lights on in the morning and turn them off at night after setting the alarm, are actual physical human beings, who piss, shit, get sick and die eventually. They also fart and stub their toes sometimes. We know this, but it is not latent in the vision we get.
No, the picture is something unmoving: a brick building perhaps, or a skyscraper. Whatever it is, it can’t move sideways one inch in either direction. Because of this, it has to be torn down.
This is literally the logic of much of the Left at the moment. This is the imagery which leads to the thoughts which lead to the actions which are so ludicrous they should not be possible. But they happen, so they are obviously possible.
When speaking of direction, one can speak of movement patterns, dominant tendencies, recurring themes, and the like. You can think of them as swirling patterns of water or air, which recreate approximately the same “structure” continually, but never exactly the same from one moment to the next.
And in my own mind, of course, I can see figure eights, and three dimensional systems of all sorts.
Here is the thing: when you step into a moving stream, it instantly reacts to you. The pattern evolves instantly.
Likewise, if you want to alter a “power structure” what you need to do is change it in small steps such that it naturally evolves in the direction you want it to go. If I have a hose, and water coming out of it, I put my thumb on there to create the spray pattern I want. The flow of water was never fixed. It was merely stable when not acted on by an outside force. Rivers are stable, but you can’t get in the same river once, can you?
So much of what is wrong with the worlds of various intellectuals is that their fear and pain–which they were running from when they retreated into their heads in the first place–want to impose on reality a stability and firmness IT DOES NOT HAVE. They want an art museum, where we can look at a variety of ideas, and choose to see them as WINDOWS INTO THE WORLD, when in reality they are pictures taken with varying degrees of accuracy, and always long ago.
Here is an idea: imagine you were an Amish farmer who never goes into town, and never interacts with anyone outside his small circle. Imagine he gets a TV somehow, and somehow gets power to it–maybe it is battery powered and his friend smuggled a bunch in with it–but for reasons of this analogy, all the programming is from 40 years ago. Imagine him worrying about the Cold War, and the nuclear Arms race, and the Iranian hostage crisis, as if they were happening NOW.
Much of the political Left, which is to say inter alia nearly all academics in good standing at most universities in most of the world, are watching TV much like this. They are seeing things that are not there, trying to solve problems which by and large THEY CREATED and which they then chose, over and over and over, not to learn from.
Ideas have long had feeling tones associated with them for me. Synesthesia is definitely something I have felt. Sounds have kinesthetic elements for me, and colors, and tastes and smells. For me, it usually defaults back to feeling, to texture, and to shapes. Sounds have shapes too, though.
Leftism has, for me, oh, patterns with textures and colors that I can’t begin to describe. So do the various Conservatisms–and there are a variety. Much of the time, my ideas work backwards from sensations and images I cannot possibly hope to translate into words. If I were an artist I could perhaps get closer, but nothing could ever match them.
Anyway, reframe Dialectical Materialism as two streams of blowing air, one hot and one less hot, one filled with red smoke and the other with yellow smoke. There is never a pure opposition, never an inability to negotiate and compromise, and always a reasonably good synthesis happening naturally and organically.
It is the aspiring Utopians, themselves, who have done the most to push actual peace and prosperity, love and freedom, farther and farther down the road, to where it now risks utter destruction, for no good reason at all. It is pure idiocy. Nothing more.