PhilosophyMemes

it's easier to misinterpret the philosophers your local ownership class has had more time to manipulate the narrative on. when you get down to it reading philosophy and theology, you find the thought leaders who have resonated throughout the ages have all been saying the same things all along:

• the power of the opressor is an illusion, weilded against you to make you easier to exploit
• religion entangled with the state is dangerous and never goes well
• the world becomes a better place when you emphasize community building. so go outside, meet your neighbors, share with them some meals, learn their dances, and learn that what your opressors say about them aren't true

in relation to the original post, i can think of no philosophers from the western milieu more widely misinterpretted than the stoics or the nialists. both schools of philosophy are fundamentally saying what the buddhists are saying. the world we live in is collectively negotiated by all of us, so why not choose, actively, to advocate for a better world to live in? you were not born with some innate meaningful purpose, no one can force one on you. you get to decide what is meaningful based on the people who are meaningful to you.

but broadly, people interpret the stoics to mean you should work yourself to death, and the nihilists to mean indisciminate killing is fine. it's like how many people understand anarchism to represent an indiscriminant path of acting without concern for others when it much more represents the idea that the only concern anyone will ever show is the concern they show through the active choice to show concern.

the thing i find so sad about these modern times when religion is so widely used to justify indescriminant killing is that these religions are trees in the same forest. their roots are fed by the same soil. but the practitioners up in their branches would rather burn down the whole forest than let their tree stand with others. in truth, the bodies of work they all stand on encourage radical empathy and tolerance, but the intolerant ignore those parts to focus on the instructions on how to resist an opressor through violence, failing to recognize they match the outlines of opressors to resist in those texts:

• israel is pharaoh
• christendom is caeser
• america never exited the plantation system

i could go on, but you catch my drift. everything old is new again because people have forgotten to recognize what they say they resist. the result is totalitarian authoritarianism is on the rise and the great global genocide that happens about once a century is nearly upon us. just as in the 20s and 30s far too many people ignored the armenian genocide and the critical lack of response enabled the holocaust, today the blood stained knife, coated in the lives of palestinians, will soon be turned against latin america and africa with a shocking degree of effeciency and scale.

the best way to avoid being killed in a genocide is to bring any current genocide to a halt. the three D's of resistance were stolen and twisted by insurance companies as a cruel joke. they were stolen back and twisted again by a man who i am not convinced is Luigi Mangione (the eyebrows are wrong). but in my youth, the three D's of resistence were:

• delay: slow the actions against your community down, or at least prevent them from accelerating. this is usually done at the ballot box.
• defend: make you community hard to beat down, or hopefully even make the opressor not even bother with you so you can lend your aid to another community facing down the opressor. this is usually done at the ammo box.
• depose: remove your opressor from all power. this is usually done at some manner of jury box.