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# Compassion as fast as you can: go time!
- URL: https://futuri.city/compassion-as-fast-as-you-can-go/
- Published: 2025-01-08T14:56:17.000Z
- Updated: 2025-01-08T14:56:17.000Z
- Author: Sophia McAllister
- Tags: Newsletter, #sophiefrommars, #Migrated-1792438291474, #Import 2026-10-19 20:32

I think the main distinction I'd make at this point between people whose politics I find worthwhile or not is just pragmatism. It's not a leftist / liberal division - although progressive liberalism is completely impractical, there are individual progressive libs who are doing more than plenty of leftists because they're actually organizing.

Sie wissen dass nicht aber sie tun es

Your ideology is what you do not what you say, and I just basically think leftism that is entirely concerned with an abstract kind of dogmatic purity is making itself irrelevant in the face of crisis. I find myself at constant dead ends in my writing trying to apply the way that the online left thinks to the real world because I find that I only really care about telling people what they can actually do in practical terms because that's what actually matters.

Obviously the concepts and the theory influences the praxis, but it seems to me that we've built a glittering clockwork orange out of pure theory. It's not so much that any of the conclusions of the abstract theory space are wrong but that the audience of that space is unable to prioritize any information whatsoever because not doing something wrong is more important than getting the right thing actually done

We unfortunately live in a celebrity culture. Arguably it's "human nature" as much as any such thing exists, to idolise and imitate other people who are doing the thing you want to do well, so it may not be escapable really, but the whole thing we're doing here is talking about how we want to live and how to get from where we are now to there, y'know? It doesn't actually require that the people talking about it are perfect people, but we've made a leftist space online with the tools of social media which are the tools of liberal culture, and so we have a functionally liberal culture discussing leftist subject matter.

The first big problem is idolisation. What I mean here is that people imagine that the people they listen to - "leftist influencers" - are morally good people and that to be like them they have to be morally perfect too, discourse in all the right ways, etc. You don't have to. That's a waste of time. I know all these people, they're just people. Some of them are quite horrid actually. Practically all of them are the bad guy terrible evil monster in someone's story because practically every person who has ever lived is

The other part of social media that creates the trap we're in is the need for "content creators" to make content in order to survive. So people just say whatever shit they think will make good content. This drives the deprioritisation of information I talked about earlier. Not every possible discourse matters in every situation. You can relax, I promise. What matters is how we want to live and how we get from where we are to where we want to be.

The politics I want to engage with from now on is about how we make the world we want to live in

It's important to also understand the asymmetry of the right and the left here. The right wing have morals that thrive under the kind of ruleset that social media lays out. People worshipping guys who act like complete pieces of shit as heroes, greed, apathy, disgust towards minorities, all of this fits really neatly into how influencers and content creators interact with audiences, so to win at the same game the left and right are playing at very different levels of difficulty. The right is also artificially inflated by fascist state capture and the inherent reactionary nature of the profit motive.

To my mind, the winning move for the left is a certain amount of, if not anonymisation exactly, just not caring who anyone is. Luigi Mangione is a pretty good example of this. If you can understand why it doesn't matter what beliefs Mangione personally holds, you understand what I mean about pragmatic leftism.

As Trump’s second inauguration nears and the news reports rising polls for Farage’s Reform Party in the UK, I think we’re all thinking about what we can do to protect our communities from escalating fascism. I’m going to be talking about it on my YouTube channel, hopefully before the inauguration, and as I’ve been thinking about what to say it sticks out to me more and more that people have an intense focus on immediate physical defense. This thinking is promoted in part by people who have a trauma-reinforced sense of a foreshortened future, who can only imagine a fight for our liberation as a direct conflict, a blaze of glory etc., and in part by people who see the only imaginable solution as keeping things inside of a sort of bubble world safe by arming ourselves at the edges. I unequivocally support minoritised communities makign themselves ready to physically defend themselves against fascist attacks, but the way the world of modern liberal capitalism works is broken on a more fundamental level than that, and security means more than self defense.

The Flobots song Run, Run, Run has a great lyric that describes the immediate all-at-once part of revolution as “compassion as fast as you can: go time!”. I love this line. Hopefully by now we all understand that things change very very very slowly a little bit at a time and then suddenly all at once. It’s not that there will be one single big thing, but Trump’s second term is bound to be *one of the* big things that pulls us into all-at-once mode. In response we have to build community solutions to feed, house, heal, protect and educate people. There is so much work to be done, and the encroaching crisis is likely to disrupt much of our everyday existences. We’re not going to fight off rovign fascist gangs but otherwise live completely as normal. Pick a part of the world that we want to build that you feel most passionate about and start organising in your community today to make it real, so that you can rely on that instead of on the world that is increasingly both falling apart and falling prey to the worst people alive.

In one of our interviews for the Red Planet documentary about the Notre Dame des Landes ZAD, our hosts told us “every time we build we are saying no”. The French state and its police force wanted to evict them from their land, and with every action the zadistes took to build up their way of life more and more, they made it harder to wipe them away to make room for the cargo airport the developers wanted to build. Every time we build we are saying no.

It is vital that we understand that safety means more than stopping bigoted attacks against minority communities, and vital that we understand what we’re trying to build isn’t just a space where progressive liberal capitalist life continues away from fascism and climate collapse and everyone has the correct leftist principles. As we turn a corner into undoubtedly scary times where the state will be more and more hostile to the working class, to organisers and activists, to minorities and to our basic humanity, we have to build. Compassion as fast as you can. Go time.