Exchanges in no Man's land

This story was written during my great freak-out, when I discovered that many of the causes and ideologies that I'd spent my life supporting and believing in were utterly corrupt. You go through life thinking that you know people, and that you know what they stand for, and then one day something happens that shows you how utterly wrong you've been. For me this moment came upon encountering requires_hate, the infamous troll who haunts the pages of this website. Through her I discovered how many 'leftist' people would support statements that I'd only previously heard from neo-nazis, so long as those statements were aimed at the right groups, of course. So long as they were 'punching up'. These events did something to me, they knocked away rose-colored spectacles that I didn't even know I was wearing. I started asking questions and always getting the wrong answers in reply. In truth, even before requires_hate, I was troubled by the things that lefty types in the science-fiction community would say, but I was always able to put it all down to a misunderstanding. I'd already attended science-fiction conventions and heard things said on panels that had me thinking "Well, these people appear to be claiming that white western Europeans are uniquely and essentially evil, but I must be misunderstanding them, because no-one in the twenty-first century would advance such an openly fascist agenda." I'd even stand up and ask "Surely, you're not saying this?" and they'd always answer "Yes, we are saying that." and I'd tell myself that they'd misunderstood my question. Requires_hate cured me of this denial, and made me see what the real agenda was.

This story pretty much marks a turning-point in my life, when I realized that collective political action will always tend to be hijacked by bad actors. People talk a good fight but almost always they will, like Cat in this story, do the very things they've denounced others for doing, if the situation suddenly turns to their advantage. Even if that's not true of the majority of people, it's true of the majority of those who act, and those people lead everyone else down the paths they have chosen. Thus politics is just lies, the majority of people will always act on their negative emotions or in their own self-interest, and the lofty claims of many people who fancy themselves activists are often just cover for self-promotion. The best one can hope for is to live one's own life as decently as you can, and accept that most everyone else will act dishonestly.