I have come up with the theory that when it comes to political activism there are, roughly speaking, two types of activists: "Genuine" and "dogmatic".
"Genuine" in this context does not necessarily mean "good", as in doing political activism for a good cause. Many activists are completely genuine but advocating for absolutely detrimental policies.
By "genuine" I mean that the activists are fighting for a specific cause, to correct a specific wrong (at least in their view) and, most importantly, if that "wrong" is corrected, they will be content and stop their activism. Problem fixed, it does not exist anymore, thus there's no need to do any more activism, and they can go on with their lives.
The vast majority of this kind of activism is for a good cause, some is for a rather irrelevant cause, and sometimes, as mentioned, it might actually be detrimental. But the crucial point is that it's a cause that the activists genuinely believe in, and will be content and satisfied if the problem is fixed, and then will just stop.
Dogmatic activism, however, and in contrast, is never content with any solutions, and will never be. Dogmatic activists will always see problems, and no matter what might be done to "fix" those problems, they are never satisfied. They will either keep claiming the problem exist, or they will find even more closely related problems and keep engaging in their activism about it. It never, ever ends.
No solution is ever enough. Not amount of compensation is ever enough. No amount of legislation, corrective procedures or changes to any system are ever enough. There is no amount of change nor fixes that they will ever be satisfied with. Even in the few cases where they can't continue protesting a very specific thing because it's extremely obvious that that thing doesn't exist anymore and it's ridiculous even by their standards to keep pretending that it does, they will just move the goalposts and start demanding even more than before.
It's a very prominent example of "if you give them an inch, they will take (or in this case demand) a mile". And that figurative "mile" never, ever stops growing in size. They will always demand more and more, they will always find more and more problems, and even when they don't just keep pretending that the original problem has not actually been solved, they just keep moving the goalposts.
That's what's the difference between "genuine" and "dogmatic" political activism. In the latter case the subject of the activism stops being a cause and has become a dogma, a quasi-religious belief, a source of zealotry that will never stop.
Needless to say, the modern far left consists for the most part of the dogmatic kind. They will never, ever be content and move to something else. They will never, ever stop. They will continue for as long as they exist and are physically capable of continuing. There literally exists no point at which they will say "ok, now everything is as we want it, we can stop now."
They will never stop. Ever.
Comments
Post a Comment