like if you convinced me that it was impossible to do good things via the state then I would simply switch to team How to do Good Things via the Organizing Space / book club / friend group / cast-iron skillet. i cannot imagine spending my one life as a missionary for the church of "that won't work"

there is almost an eschatological component to that kind of pessimism too, eg it's okay that it's impossible to do good things because rapture or whatever

Its bitterness that the state they want doesn’t already exist.

📌

Denial is one of the biggest forms of empathy avoidance, and (present company excluded) I feel like a lot of careers in academic theory are similarly meant to avoid actual empathy.

"no no nothing will work we are doomed. to understand this more clearly, we need a deep engagement with Lacan" no what we need to do is to fire up the grill or something, why are we still reading at this point

"We can't fix/improve anything" is a pro-status quo argument and thus effectively conservative, regardless of the leftist credentials of the philosophies called in support.

Seems very close to the colleague of mine that bristled at a candidate saying that theory is only useful when put into action. "We know that theory is important in and of itself" they said. And... I genuinely don't understand how that could be.