“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.”

I was just discussing the concept of “divine madness” as opposed to “madness,” elsewhere. For instance, how Turing and Jeanne d’Arc were treated, despite having no small hand in saving their respective societies. How Nazis were embraced and reintegrated into various societies, how imperialism which is extremely sick is considered “normal,” while communists are considered vile and delusional. Yet Marx’s predictions have held up very well.

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 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:

1. 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.

2. 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.”

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?