Thread by @rechelon

My mother's New Age perspective is more or less that whatever you believe is, by definition, true for you.

...So she will howl at me and my sisters when we bring up wildly abusive things she's done, "Why are you choosing to believe that?!! What does it benefit you!?"

The idea of there being a single fixed objective material reality, rather it being a shared social "consensus" dream, is literally her definition of evil. In the specific cult in which we were raised (400k members worldwide!) the language they use for this is "Mortal Mind."

When I was a teenager my right lung ripped apart. And my mother treated this as an imposition, because in her anti-realist framework I was CHOOSING to believe I was injured. So she dragged her feet and prioritized snacks for my sisters for hours while I lay on the ground gasping.

While I have serious lasting health issues partially as a result of her philosophical anti-realism, growing up in the radical Left and organizing for decades within it, I've met a large number of folks with FAR worse disabilities as the result of leftist "private" spiritualism.

Common across these survivors is a deep abiding HATRED for The Left's widely held boomer narrative that scientific realism and physicalism are recent western inventions and the central evil behind all oppression in history (or all oppression worth considering).

This is simply untrue. There have always been realists and materialists, and in many societies these concepts were most popular with the lowest classes. Western misuse of "science" as a brand and attempts to control it as a social institution hardly condemn the idea or dynamic.

But such is a *useful narrative* to many parties, and it has remained popular for two reasons: 1) you can cleanse yourself of the sins of other whites and obtain the title of "indigenous" witch (just like your English grandma) by believing in trash, 2) it reduces social friction.

The Left, as I endlessly point out, is an attempted coalition of underdogs, nothing more. It has no shared ideological core, indeed it's *allergic* to philosophical or ethical consistency because such fixedness impedes its ability to massage over conflicts between constituents.

If all you're concerned about is holding people together and stopping them from fighting, anti-realism is a godsend. Everyone gets to be just as "valid" as everyone else! This is why people scream bloody murder over anyone using the "reality" word. It's a threat to the peace.

Everything can be tolerated except for the intolerant, and the very idea that there is a single reality -- which everyone naturally thinks they have a better picture of -- is a nuclear bomb of intolerance. To the collectivists, the WORST sin possible is arrogance/confidence.

Problem is, of course, anarchism is not defined by some happenstance social coalition but engages in pretty firmly rooted ideas. We are innately obliged to be "intolerant" and disruptive of any attempted popular coalition whenever we stick to our principles.

There's a good reason that the blowup over religious "tolerance" looks so similar to the blow ups over left unity:

"why rock the boat over a theoretical difference that makes no impact today? it's not like different ideological/ontological frames inevitably have consequences!"

The cult I grew up in faced a lot of legal repression over all the kids that died from never going to the doctor. In response they now make a big show with argumentative contortions to claim that their beliefs just happen to line up with getting the legally required vaccines etc.

This is a common move with almost every one I run across. "We're against the idea of a single reality or that our best scientific theories have any unique purchase on it, but we're not going to ignore modern medicine." Um why?! In practice that tension causes real-world friction.

The reality is that insofar as a belief in ontological maps divergent from physicalism are actual beliefs they oblige, however rarely, divergent responses to the world. My mom did *eventually* take me to the hospital, but her lack of belief had consequences around the fringes.

Paul Feyerabend, the fiery postmodern troll who attacked science as epistemic imperialism and claimed faith healing was just as valid, implied that this was all hot air and made no functional difference. Except he turned to a faith healer when he got cancer & postponed treatment.

One of the silly deflections currently popular is "there are many aspects to a religion beyond just unsubstantiated supernatural ontological claims, like community and ritual" sure, but ontological claims are a critical necessary component and have always been.

I've had atheist anarchist friends who stayed in quaker, jewish, catholic, etc communities and practices but no one ever said they were "religious." Similarly no one calls secular western buddhists who strip out all the gods, mysticism and reincarnation "religious."

In the 1800s and early 1900s jewish/yiddish anarchists were vast in number and, as atheists, quite open about seeing *judaism* as inherently an enemy. They disrupted and mocked services, assaulted Rabbis. Just as queer anarchists attacked churches and violated services in the 00s

Now of course it's just plain *funny* when the religious parrot that "atheists only know about christianity," and then when someone reveals that they have intimate knowledge of other religions, they get even more outraged and declare you "too traumatized" to be listened to.

The spectacle on here of Leftists furiously dogpiling an iranian atheist anarchist or calling an indigenous atheist anarchist "white" is pedestrian. The Left is a coalition, and the ingroup must be protected from the near-enemy at the cost of pretty much anyone on the periphery.

If your five white friends trying on pagan cosplay and chaos magick larping might be perturbed or upset by your standing with a trans iranian anarchist stating that there's a single reality and it has no gods... so much the worse for the iranian stranger. Friends > principles.

This is why I emphasize that anarchism is "intolerant." The core lesson from decades of antifascism has been the only way to stop fascist entryism is to take incredibly unpopular stands within the left and be willing to burn friendships to the ground. Intolerance can be necessary

I will always remember some queer atheist moroccan anarchists SOBBING in berlin, betrayed to discover other leftists refusing to stand with them against their oppressors for fear of disrupting their local activist coalitions.

Ethics can oblige betraying your immediate community.

The first response of leftists to a conceptual conflict is to try for arbitrary boundaries; saying that a belief over here "just won't" impact a practical reality over there, "let's just never examine implications or make comparisons." But that's just not how anything works.

It's easy to have peace during family gatherings, we just have to respect our mother's belief that she never abused us. Hell it would be "useful" to personally believe that.

But whatever I occasionally deluded myself as a kid, my tape recorder, physical reality, said otherwise.

And I have betrayed the best interests of both her and "myself" and instead cast my lot in with singular objective reality and the disruptive "intolerant" resistance such obliges when we overrule my mother's "lived experience" and tell her she's factually wrong.

The idea that there is a singular reality and thus some things are true and some things are false, and some models will be better, is deeply destructive of social peace. Thankfully anarchists have always been bomb-chuckers. We are not afraid of ruins in the discord server.

We do not and should not "get along" about some things. I want to be hated by anti-realists and religious same as I endeavor to be hated by tankies. That's at least an HONEST relation. We should be more like Louis Lingg: "I despise you, I despise your bullshit. Hang me for it."