Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

🥽the system we are in likes to give us all diet love. Love aspertain.

Over and over it puts us in situations where we feel that need and try to fulfill it, and then we are given solutions that taste like love but do not actualize it. Instead of giving the shirt off your back to a person who needs it in front of you, you give it to Goodwill. Instead of pouring devotion on your community you pour it on a celebrity or influencer who cannot be there for you. Instead of doing the hard work of making change yourself you write a letter to a powerful person and hope they care.

Cast your eyes down to people in your life. Try being more simple. You do in fact need to act on your love instincts in ways that matter to be fulfilled and no it is not easy, straightforward or safe.

You have to understand that love is about your need for others to have their needs met, and unless their needs actually get met you will continue starving even if you *feel* full.

🥽 in this moment of oppression and hatred, the starting point of resistance is love. Not the fluffy love of cartoons, but the wild love that drives someone to throw themselves in harms way to protect another. A thing almost all of us are capable of in the right circumstances regardless of our circumstances.

The same pain that drives a NIMBY to sweep an unhoused person out of sight today could tomorrow see them throwing themselves at a police line howling for justice were they to choose to embrace the need the pain represents rather than try to bury it.

Allow yourselves, please, to feel and share the pain. Cry for help. Beg for mercy. Be angry. Be hurt. Talk about your personal experiences. Yes, there are cruel people who will cheer and feel emboldened, there are those who will try to exploit you… but they will always be outnumbered by the people who will see it for what it is and feel the painful need to act.

Whether they will act wisely or quickly, of course, is not predictable.

🥽every popular revolution has a preceding moment where everyone embraces “brotherly love” forged through shared oppression. Every revolution ultimately falls short of that moment, yet pushes that idea forward.

This moment must be one where we learn to love the wonder of not knowing the minds of others. That when we see a ship in the night, we are rightly vigilant, but sit in the knowledge that most of the time the other captain wishes no ill.

The benefit of the doubt is not a naïve position, it just may feel that way when somebody decides to take advantage of it, and it may deem that way if you are not aware it is exploitable.

Love is not naïve, nor is it detached and hypothetical, nor is it apathetic. It is much more nuanced and significant than the chemicals that drive the feeling. The game of Go also has simple rules but is dizzying in its variation and nuance.

A society or community is likewise an emergent consequence of much simpler individual interactions.

🥽please my friends, look at the people around you. Do you see the little ways they say “I care about you”?

This is the deepest of human instincts. We are not actors who only behave out of self interest. We violate our self interest all the time for the good of each other and the good of group. Most people will do so voluntarily and will do so in the absence of coercion. Small acts of brave selflessness that have big impacts that are hard to comprehend.

All the exploitations I may list in this corrupt empire of ours are possible because the vast majority of people will make quiet little sacrifices for other people, and a cruel enough person can exploit that fact to reliably extract surplus value for selfish gain.

People do not rise up because they are being treated unfairly, they rise up because other people are also being treated unfairly. They rise up because the force of collective love is greater than the instinct to survive.