Whenever I talk to people who are apathetic to politics I always say “apathy is a political statement.” I’ve found it to be pretty effective once I explain what I mean.

Apathy is a privileged view of the world. This is a somewhat extreme example, but if you are apathetic to politics while there are people living on the streets you are essentially saying “those people’s lives don’t matter. I don’t care if they die, are harmed by police, etc.”

This is how I converted my girlfriend actually. Good luck out there comrades. <3

  • iriyan@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Ever since digital social media reached the vast masses of the world, the topic keepers, the mods, the board admins, etc. passed the message out under the excuse of preventing verbal violence and “conflict” that politics, religion, and such are not to be discussed within the jurisdiction of those in control. The next step was that the “hobby” of politics is for the hobbyists to discuss such in specific boards and threads set under such topic. So politics became a “thing” among many other things, specific to those who are “interested” in this specialty.

    The next phase was that people in their physical social sphere were conditioned to have an aversion of politics just like their friendly mods and admins on social media. 10 workers would stand on a bus stop and 9 will move away or even curse at someone making a political comment. So people now can be friends as long as they can respect that no politics are discussed. Nice, leave it to the experts and those who rule, they know better.

    So people now not only are not interested in politics but have grown defenses against anyone who expresses a political opinion. A political opinion is an idea someone has about how the things we have in common are managed. Work, public areas, entertainment, environment, laws, … are all subjects of people who are political.

    One can start feeling and wondering whether this late social development was designed and pre-programmed within social media. Social media spaces gave the right to anyone to start a community on their own and “dictate” how it evolves and operates. So little dictators turned against “politics”, which is the compromise and discourse of conflicting ideas about what we need to share.

    No, it wasn’t by design, that would have been a conspiracy theory, it just so happened to be this way. The effects in society are there though, whether intentional or coincidental, the aversion and distancing of those “freaks” that want to discuss politics in public, is here to stay. You challenge any dictator on his domain on the issue and you don’t deserve an explanation of being silenced.

    But there is a significant amount of populations who don’t have access to social media. They don’t count, they never did anyway. They are excluded.

    Instead of society shaping the social media they need, corporations dictated how social media works, allowed dictators free access to rule, and dictators do what they do best. Enforce their own wishes and decisions on others. This is what is so great about being the “owner” of the domain. The exceptions, like this place here, are harmless because the only people that would even end up here are people who are excluded from all other media for saying the things we talk about here. No matter how good and important the things we discuss are, we are not convincing anyone outside this sphere of ours.