Phil Crimmins:
I never know what people mean when they talk about FDR like it has characteristics. FDR is not a thing.
^This.
I became very frustrated during the recent events surrounding JegSomHeter aka Sebastian being banned. On the opposite side of the fence, I perceived folks like Hajnal to be the "in crowd" that was becoming anti-philosophical, the enemy within the city, while the fine folks criticizing the hasty ban were the "saviors" of FDR. Well, inevitably when you polarize yourself on an idea so strongly, seeing go exactly the wrong way will make you quite resentful. I had similar thoughts about leaving the boards.
But I cooled off and had some time to think. I found it useful to take a step back, and look at what's actually going on here. We're talking about a forum on the Internet. This is not a commune; we don't rely on each other to live. This is not the fate of the universe at stake, or of humanity. Not even Stef's legacy will be greatly affected by anything that happens on the boards; his works stand on their own, and though the content of the boards have often been a source of inspiration for some of what he talks about, he certainly does not need any particular member here. Nothing critical to any of our lives is lost if people abandon ship. And even if everyone leaves, the general trend of market anarchism exists elsewhere and is increasingly penetrating the political sphere and its fringes. The movement for child advocacy, and self-knowledge, and therapy versus psychiatry, and unschooling, and all these great ideas, these are not limited to "FDR", whatever that even means. Is the body of work, the books, the podcast, the videos, is that not FDR? I find it strange that we should be talking about those three letters as if it should mean some abstract community. So, I have to ask, what exactly is it that these series of people leaving, and sometimes denouncing with righteous fervor, are disenchanted with?
I can only answer for myself. I don't mean to hijack this thread, but it seems it will do no harm since Hajnal has expressed her intention not to return anyway. So I will say this: for me, it is a disappointment set up by excessive expectations. It had little to do with the actual ideals of what is generally understood to be FDR. Yes, somewhere at the heart of it, I thought "yeah, we're gonna smash the State!", "yeah, we're gonna raise children and save the world through peace and love, sans hippie hedonism", all that good stuff. But there was so much more that I wanted. Are we not all tired of living in the matrix? Every day of our lives, living amongst people largely blind to their own minds, living with their hatred and their desires to use and abuse us, living with lies and brutality, and of course it's more than we can bear. We're tired of it. I hope I am not speaking too generally, too assuming. I know it is true for my mind. So to see that we haven't changed, that we're still so very human even in conversations with people who hold the highest ideals, that is a depressing disappointment of the worst sort, isn't it? It is as though my heart would cry out, "if it cannot remain pure here, then where?!".
For me too, this was a mirage of sorts. Why I thought one man from the suburbs of Toronto could work out all the answers and save the world, I don't know. I do know that it makes no sense to be resentful of what he never claimed. I still appreciate FDR for what it is, an amazing resource for philosophical thinking and a hub for many cool people. But we're so early in the game. We're living in the prologue to what will be utopia's ancient history. The oasis still awaits us, somewhere. Hell, there won't be just one oasis. There never is. It starts somewhere, but water tends to flow. Why would we think the roots of utopia would grow in one place and only there?
But there's no shame in being human. People have conflict, it's inevitable. The nature of that conflict is what we can control. No one has murdered each other because of a debate held here. We don't typically resort to vicious ad homs and death threats. It is one of the most civil environments for conversation that I've ever witnessed. If that means being vulnerable to the occasional over-psychologizing, I say so be it! I won't hijack this thread. But I do think this is a topic worth discussing at another time, in another thread or somewhere else. Why do some people become so emotionally invested in "FDR"?