I’ve seen it pop up in quite a few threads, sometimes in jest (or sort of in-jest), but I think it comes up enough to talk about seriously, both from an individual behaviour standpoint and a broader activism/socialism/whatever standpoint.
This is also coming from someone that sees themselves as very extroverted (but also autistic and socially anxious, so pretty poor at getting my social needs met), so maybe this whole idea is way off base.
There’s two narratives here for discussion in this thread:
- I struggle with pushing myself to be social, and I am afraid this makes me a poor activist. At some point or another advocating for socialism will rely on socialists to talk to non-socialists in spaces and circumstances that are not comfortable.
- Socialism, on some level, involves a society with more time and space to socialise. What will this look like for a severe introvert? Will there be room for a person to buy a plot of land in the hills and live separate from society forever? Will I have to go to Commissar DanceClass’s Dance Class?
And two sentiments that should be discussed with those narratives re: other people:
- Introvert, socially anxious, autistic etc. There are people they get along with and comfortable social situations, but for a variety of reasons need a break regularly
- “I just hate people”
This whole post was a thought I had when reading the second people-hater. My initial thought was that this was an internal pathologisation of people based on the society we live in. If the only people you encounter day to day are ladder climbing suburbanites whose main interests are competitively assessing lawn heights and promotions, you’re probably going to “hate people”. However, this may not be the case for all people who claim this of themselves. Maybe they hate other people on the road, people in queues for groceries etc. I just find it hard to believe that someone who genuinely hates all people would hop on to a forum (an entirely social activity) and spend any amount of time there. Nonetheless, it probably happens.
But, I figured that the topic had enough range and nuance to turn into its own thread instead of responding directly, and saw someone else post the introvert activism thing.
One of the things I thought of was the social battery and how it’s often expended on work and commuting. If your main social energy is spent at work/commuting, I feel like it’s very possible that one might come away with a dim view of any social activity (incl. organising) and your ability to participate in it, especially if you’d largely done it since school (another cutthroat highly hierarchical social setting).
(how is commuting social? You’re in a constant negotiation with other drivers to avoid bumping your 2 ton $20k machines into each other, with a wide variety of levels of aggression, empathy, engagement etc. It’s not words, but there is a communication there that can be very draining)
I used to think I hate a lot of people, but I found that I do not hate communists. It stands to reason: Do I really hate people, or do I hate what their environment has done to them?
Socialising is exhausting for me, but I feel that this is largely due to depression and, again, the environment of ‘you or me’ we had thrust upon us.
I have found that being a part of communist spaces has done wonders for my self-esteem and in turn, my social skills.
Also side thought: If you came to the latter realisation, I don’t think it necessarily means you have to interact with them for the most part.
Maybe a hot take, but introvert/extrovert is a false dichotomy that is more unhelpful than helpful. Sure, people can be more or less outgoing etc in a given situation, but to reify that into an essential trait that everyone posseses and two categories into which everyone can be divided ends up flattening the complexity of human social experience in a way that’s mostly arbitrary
You can really feel the shortcomings in the classifications when you get people who are like:
“See, I’m weird! Because I’m an introvert normally, but on occasion I’m extremely extroverted!”
“Does anybody else feel introverted except when they’re around friends in a social situation, which then turns you into a major extrovert?”
“I dislike people, but I love spending time in nature despite being an introvert!”
“I would actually describe myself as an introverted extrovert / extroverted introvert, because…”
It’s partially just not understanding what the terms mean and merely boiling them down into “Introvert = wants to stay inside literally 24/7; extrovert = wants to stay outside literally 24/7,” and partially just because the terms suck even if everybody did understand the actual intended definitions of the terms. It’s not just not a binary, it’s a very fluid situation that varies based on the time of day, time of year, whether you have friends, how many friends you have, your current working/education situation, and dozens and dozens of other things.
I’m not entirely sure why people think it’s a useful classification system to have, beyond it merely being another in-group identifier like being an INTJ or ENTP or PPB or whatever in that ridiculous personality classification system.
like being an INTJ or ENTP or PPB
My PPB score says I’m more of a hog weiner than a poopballs
I’ve worked multiple jobs where they make us to personality tests, especially Myers Briggs.
Yeah, agree, its mostly a simplification of always changing variables that you yourself are able to influence.
Communism will let me live in the walls and floors. Any less I will not accept. I’ll happily help society at large as long as I’m not physically observed at any point ever.
Based
Aras will construct service tunnels accessible only to them, often under floors and in walls. Unstable units may retreat into these tunnels. It is not recommended to attempt to retrieve them.
Oh look, a thread targeting me
I actually like people a lot, or else I wouldn’t be bitching here 24/7 about how badly it sucks and how difficult it is being social. I’m just amazingly bad at it, I have extreme difficulty getting along with even decent people. Finding decent people.
Is there a hexbear discord that I can lurk? All the queer spaces on discord are fucking unbearable. I need to be immersing myself in trarxism and tranarchy more.
I actually like people a lot
That’s where I am too, I never quite vibed the misanthropic stereotype of introversion. I really enjoy hanging out with people, I’m just very ready for them to be gone at the end of the evening.
Low social battery :)
All the queer spaces on discord are fucking unbearable.
why?
Uh libs and stuff. You try to tell people that the backlash to walkable cities is chud shit and they get arsey. Also “apolitical queer spaces”.
No I am not very well adjusted.
You try to tell people that the backlash to walkable cities is chud shit and they get arsey.
oh, well fuck those libs
For real, I’m so sick to death of
-ass queer people with 0 intersectionality and 0 ability to even spare a thought for anyone who’s nor a cis white assimilationist gay.Grrr
Capitalism sucks for introverts by requiring not just that most people work, but work for 8+ hours a day in an “open seating plan” under fluorescent lights with little time to recharge afterward. Not to mention driving home or riding transit, which are both highly social in a different way. Then if you want to maintain relationships with your friends and family, they probably miss you since you have been gone all day.
Work is social as long as society exists. The degree of social interaction skyrocketed with the Industrial Revolution and the advent of large scale cooperation as the norm of daily labor.
For introverts, a society that recognizes the essentially social character of labor is far better because it makes possible the overall reduction of labor by making production more focused on need. In capitalism it does not matter how materially productive we are, because the basis of profit is how much abstract labor you can accumulate (as money) regardless of how productive that labor was.
The discussion about how driving and riding mass transit are highly social modes of transportation has me thinking about what an entirely non-social mode of transportation would look like. Perhaps cycling home on a secluded dirt trail? (Or perhaps the non-commute of work from home also counts)
Teleporting lol
Those modes of travel are social, not when viewed abstractly, but when they exist in a social context.
The question is why do the masses all commute along the same paths? The answer is found in the physical distribution of home and work, and the economy of building shared resources at those destination e.g. apartment buildings and office buildings. So when I’m traveling to work, my travel isn’t independent, it presupposes a society where a large number of people work together in one building or downtown.
So driving a bus on the moon would be non-social, but driving a bus through NYC is social. But I guess the moon is getting crowded these days too with all the rovers.
Public transit is not demanding of social interaction. I’m an introvert who moved to the city and ditched my car. Just being around people is a different thing from enjoying going out of my way to have conversations with them.
Social interaction is not limited to verbal communication. Letting someone merge on the highway is social interaction. Lining up to board the train is social interaction. Social interaction happens even without opening your mouth.
This is just my 2 cents with no research, but introverted/extroverted almost seems like pseudoscience sometimes. This is so situation specific, too. The reality is that life under capitalism is extremely draining and this has created lots of other issues down the line, even how we interact with others.
I become much more “extroverted” when I’m not constantly haunted by past trauma lol
And also when I’m around people who aren’t shitheads
I become much more “extroverted” when I’m not constantly haunted by past trauma lol
I suspect that I would too. But it’s been like 20 years since I was un-haunted enough to speak to anyone IRL. I’ve forgotten what it’s like and don’t know how to break free.
Like most “personality” labels, the definitions are not prescriptive. But online memes and communities and pop science and news bastardize them so they can say “literally me.”
No, being introvert does not mean everyone has crippling anxiety and cannot talk to a cashier. And being extrovert does not mean you’re partying 50 hours a week and have no anxiety or awareness about your surroundings.
“I hate people” is just the literal meaning of misanthropy and is a deeply pathological attitude to have. If that’s someone’s reason for not doing socialism, the answer is to do what you deem best to fix that attitude.
Most people who say they hate everyone find to hard to relate to anyone, and that’s the main issue. And that’s either because the misanthrope needs to work on themselves, they can no longer see shared humanity. Or it’s because they’re a person with some kind of divergent lifestyle and they’re not being acclimated properly.
It could go either way and I don’t know which is more common. A lot of people on internet forums probably come from a bookish, nerdy background and don’t have quite the same experiences or goals as other people. So they don’t feel acclimated and end up misanthropic. But whatever the cause I think better and socialized mental healthcare could help. Also people work too goddamn much.
On a systemic level, yeah, there are a ton of ways to help such people if you actually have levers of power, I was just trying to be brief in answering what a socialist who is personally a self-identified misanthropic socialist should do.
Edit: I’ve been a misanthrope and still need to uproot some parts of it that are embedded really deep in my personality, to the point that it feels like there’s a second person underneath me who does an objectionable job managing things when I’m not paying attention to my actions. I think your diagnosis is fair.
To be fair, socialism is, at its core, a type of structure for economy and production. You don’t need to love people to conclude it’s the most logical. One can be a narcissistic, selfish, psychopath and choose socialism simply because it makes sense, like choosing to wear a jacket when it rains, or because it serves their personal agenda.
Though I don’t think the majority of people on here who “hate people” fall into the above category.
I agree with what you are directly saying, but remember that the question is based on someone having their misanthropy preventing them from doing socialism – which, again, I can identify with from pathologies I have spent many years trying to fix in myself. Yes, Marxism is either Scientific Socialism or it’s another show-and-tell affectation just like every other “analytical lens” that you learn in a philosophy or literature class, and things like moral sentiments must come second to that for it to have power as a means of social analysis.
That makes sense. I feel like if you do desire to help people, but avoid doing so because you feel like you hate people, then I don’t know. Maybe you don’t really hate people after all
That’s why I said the thing to do is work on that feeling. Just because someone feels that way now doesn’t mean they need to feel that way in the future, especially if they don’t want to feel that way, and very few misanthropes really “like” being misanthropes even if they revel in it as cope (again, speaking from experience).
I feel like now is a good time to mention that the existence of introversion and extraversion has never actually been confirmed scientifically. The idea comes from Carl Jung, who is not exactly known for his scientific rigor when it comes to his theory (although I will not deny his influence though). Even he said that both introverts and extroverts are INCREDIBLY rare, and most people are neither.
I agree, but also people use it to describe themselves and they probably mean something so it’s worthwhile discussing what they might mean and if it’s worth addressing
It’s fine as a personal taste, or if you have social anxiety, or whatever.
Just own it as a personal thing, and don’t use it as an excuse to make up misanthropic shit. Like capitalist propaganda and liberal mythology do 99% of the time, often to prop up systemic racism and other forms of bigotry, but also just to tell us that we need to prostrate ourselves to authority and preserve capitalism and state because other human beings just need to be controlled (but maybe I repeat myself, because I guess the latter is actually a somewhat disguised bigotry also, being a form of classism…)
i don’t hate people, i hate ignorant/intellectually lazy american natoid fascists (which is basically the only type of person that exists around me)
if i can work from home and communicate exclusively through text mediums then i will be happy in the revolution factory
(at least let me wear full body/face coverings if i have to go out)
Unrelated but u have such a great username.
thanks
marianne williamson was right, you need to wage a war of love
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Autism gamingbssically made it so that people do osychic damage to me, but i still try to be nice and cool :)
Same, sorta, though I think it probably started before gaming (I was a weird kid at school who didn’t play video games and was pretty severely ostracised at the best of times).
Echoing sentiments that I’ve seen others make already, I find the premise of the existence of ‘introversion/extroversion’ suspect to begin with. I believe that the phenomenon being observed has more to do with a confluence of varying factors and how they have affected a person. A person that has experienced a lot of trauma in very specific ways will inevitably withdraw from people, groups, etc. if they have been the source of fear and pain. I think that in general a lot of this is inherently what socialism struggles to resolve, albeit as a secondary outgrowth of socialism’s primary aims. ‘Introversion’ and misanthropy and other sorts of anti-people ills are the systemic children of the traumas of capitalism.
Yeah, the friend who won’t talk to me, as well as my de facto best friend, say they “hate people” but really they’ve just had bad experiences with their main social milieus; one has been a heroin addict since the age of 18, the other has been a poly drug user since before I was born. The fact that they are also both neurodivergent (bipolar, autistic) probably contributes to the high degree of social failure—I know it’s been a major contributor to my high degree of social failure, moreso than my drug use (which is how I met both of them).
My best friend actually told me recently I’m the only person he trusts. Most of my friendships end in disaster because they have come to expect the worst, and don’t expect someone to be so genuine like me; recently I had a friend I’ve known since 2019 fucking accuse me of stealing shit and kick me out in the cold, abruptly.
And that’s why I “hate people.” Because one of three things tends to happen when I get close at all to someone: I absolutely love them and they’re emotionally distant and it blows up in my face; they absolutely love me and I’m emotionally distant and it blows up in my face; or I’m just chilling and all of the sudden this person fucking hates me.
But I also “hate people” in the sense that…I genuinely either can’t stand interacting with or find extremely boring the vast majority of people. It fucking aggravates me when I’m told “Just make other friends” or “There’s other fish in the sea” because there fucking aren’t, and I can’t. Even my de facto best friend…I can’t really have a conversation with him. I ignore his texts a lot and tbf I should ask myself when it’s going to blow up in my face.
