I'm going to take the bingo free space here: "accepting that people are evil by nature"
Probably one of the worst things you can do to yourself
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
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and dropping an optimist outlook being somehow equal to maturity
"Put on a fake smile as you die inside, that is how you become an adult!" -my parents if they were more honest about what they've been taught to think.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”
Maturity itself is a vague concept
I think "maturity" is just becoming THE liberal, the complete opposite of class consciousness. Accepting that this is life, there is nothing you can do, so suck up to your bosses and feed the system like the good worker ant you are.
I'd be delighted to feed the system. Under socialism, where I'm much more confident my efforts will help society.
❤️
This is definitely a pillar of what maturity means within the superstructure of capitalism. Paired with the dehumanization of children and devaluation of childishness, it's another tool of social control deployed against workers to ensure their obedience.
I don't agree with that. It may be the liberal idea of maturity, but not "maturity."
Exactly, the liberal idea, I didn't word it correctly.
You're fine. We all forget that people don't immediately know our minds, especially me.
I think there are some universal-ish concepts to maturity, such as emotional regulation (as opposed to being very dysregulated, which is most noticeable in the form of outward-facing meltdowns and/or belligerence over everyday things - presuming that one's everyday life is not a warzone or something in which case dysregulating would be more understandable). BUT, as soon as we get into what the solutions are to this kind of thing, we're wading into the individualist system, which does a couple of key things:
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It isolates these processes from systemic factors (e.g. it can't be that the system is creating this kind of behavior in a person - it must be something going wrong inside of them that can be overcome with better striving, willpower, techniques, etc.). Or sometimes it might delve into your upbringing, but it's not going to get into the superstructure you live within.
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It emphasizes that you are the only one you can control, cleanly cutting you off from thoughts of broader social change. So individualist therapy is all about changing who you are and, in so doing, blaming yourself, whether it explicitly frames it that way or not. It might even say it's not your fault, yet still instruct you in such a way that the emphasis is on changing you.
Sustained, organized pressure for others to change would probably get filed under "controlling" in individualist therapy language. An individual therapist might support a thing like a union or a social justice protest if you brought it up to them, but then retreat back into "what can you change about you." This, among other things, reveals what individualism is about. That the goal is essentially to help you self-actualize as "a powerless worker with an identity who is placated by having one." So we can say that "maturity" under individualism has nothing to do with "empowerment" and everything to do with being an island unto yourself.
This powerlessness leaves friction unresolved though, i.e. the contradictions. No amount of mental techniques can resolve them because the material sources of them are still there. So "maturity" for communism involves actually becoming empowered. First with class consciousness and then with organizing. The communist view says "this is fixable, not inevitable, and we can fix it, but we're going to need more than a couple of people in a private room for a brief session talking now and then."
It isolates these processes from systemic factors (e.g. it can’t be that the system is creating this kind of behavior in a person - it must be something going wrong inside of them that can be overcome with better striving, willpower, techniques, etc.). Or sometimes it might delve into your upbringing, but it’s not going to get into the superstructure you live within.
It emphasizes that you are the only one you can control, cleanly cutting you off from thoughts of broader social change. So individualist therapy is all about changing who you are and, in so doing, blaming yourself, whether it explicitly frames it that way or not. It might even say it’s not your fault, yet still instruct you in such a way that the emphasis is on changing you.
This is not my lived experience, and I had some pretty bad therapists, when I had them. I did have one therapist like that and she told me "just believe in G-d."
Ironically, the best and last therapist I had was reared evangelist and went to an evangelist school, and was a believer. One day I asked her, "if belief and worship of pagan deities is magical thinking, why isn't belief in mainstream religious deities magical thinking?"
This woman looked me full in the face and emphatically said, "It is!”
Last therapist needed. I've had some rough patches since then, but I gathered enough tools over the years to weather the storms.
Sorry to hear that. And fair, I'm generalizing a bit based on what I've seen and my understanding of the academic secular practice of therapy, for lack of a better way to put it. Yours is not the first story I've heard of therapists who basically just say "god" is the answer.
More to the point, faith in anything isn't just "flipping a switch."
That the more hardcore evangelical believer was more honest than the WASP believer was astounding, and reminds me not to become too entrenched in even "safe assumptions." You may guess I continue to wrestle with challenges set before us.
I'm still on the fence about this, I was never an optimistic person and even if I was things wouldn't be any different.
i'll see yours and raise you: "accepting that people are stupid by nature"
That's right. I can feel myself doing it on purpose to make people mad
I'm wondering how much alienating the people we want to ally with, or at least to whom we wish to present a reasonable case for our cause, actually serves our purpose?
If you grew up surrounded by people who were evil or at least not very nice it's the only thing you know. People ARE evil sometimes, just not always, but I still don't trust most people tbh.
If you mean as in "not a universal value outside of capitalism": Probably "financial independence", which does matter under capitalism due to how shitty being a dependent in a hyper individualist society can be, but in a close-knit communal society, for example, wouldn't make sense for everybody to be individually striving for financial independence (if they trade in money in the first place, which they wouldn't have need for a lot of times).
I think the reason it's such a painful thing to be a dependent under capitalism is because the system is designed such that most decision-making power derives from having money or capital. So if you're wealthy, most options are available to you at any time and the marketed open-ended possibility of capitalism is at least somewhat real for you. If you're working class and financially independent, few options are actually real but you do have some choices and can carve out a sense of individual identity and autonomy from it (which capitalism supports you in doing, over you organizing with other workers in a collective). But if you're dependent, your options largely fall to the good graces of those you're dependent on, which may be very limiting not even out of malice but because those you're dependent on don't have a great range of options themselves; though in some cases, there is malice too, which only makes it harder.
On living alone I'd just like to interject that's pretty ironic that the reactionaries call us on trying to destroy the familiar unit when it's their neoliberalism on steroids that's doing that. Textbook "accusing them of what you are" tactics.