Politics · 11:35am Sep 2nd, 2023
Is everyone... gone? Already? Did I scare you all off with that title?
Good. This will most certainly not be a blog for everyone, but at the same time, it may not be as restrictive as you might imagine by the title alone.
But first... I might've underestimated how much blog writing would fit with my vacation time. It's a soothing experience, something I can do when I have some time free from sighseeing... that's why my activity on FimFiction has hardly gone down since I've arrived on Malta. Working on stories? That can be exhausting, but just putting a blog or two out when I feel inspired...? That feels alright, I think. And it is very much relaxing.
But back to the topic at hand... well, I might've baited you all with the title a bit. Or not, I'm not sure yet, but I'm definitely not going to be revealing my political views here in this blog. You see, on this website, I really don't think it's my place to talk about this kind of stuff or make general political statements; unless something extraordinary happens I guess, but I'm really not sure what that could be. If other people want to do so - that's fine by me, I don't mind that, really. But I'm simply not one of them.
I try to create an environment on my profile that welcomes everyone, regardless of many things, one of them being worldview. Some of my closest friends on here might have picked up on some clues as for my own political standing, but I'm not about to leave those here. That being said...
I'm not a... disinterested kind of girl. I very much follow political discourse both domestic and, through cultural osmosis, somewhat the one happening in the UK and the United States. I'm not someone who believes that "truth always lies in the middle" either; if it did, we wouldn't have to search for it. It often is somewhere inbetween two radical sides, true, but it's also usually closer to one of them than the other, whichever side it might be at a given time.
But you know, what I mean to touch upon the most in this blog is how insanely brutal discourse has become between political parties. It sometimes feels like we're on the edge of a global civil war, where sides would not be divided by national borders, but rather political standings. This is how far we've fallen, in a way.
I'm working to be kind of... part-linguist, part-sociologist. And you know what? Humans are social creatures. Most of us need the feeling of "belonging" to something. In the Middle Ages, that was the local community. Starting around the 18th century and the rise of nationalism, it became one's country. Now, I feel like for many - for reasons I won't delve into right now - even that is starting to not be enough; no, now we need a feeling of belonging to a group sharing a given worldview. And that might sound asinine when put that way, but in actuality, in makes a lot of sense when you think about it - a worldview is essentially a person's vision on how the world should look like. It's something they feel like they've formed themselves - and sometimes they have. And you know what? I totally understand wanting to belong to a group of like-minded individuals who share your self-formed vision for the world. It's appealing.
What I don't quite understand is the lack of any attempts - even just simple attempts - to understand the other sides. And yes, I get that sometimes, they may appear as incredibly stupid and even insane, but please, if you're reading this - try to judge common people by more than their political affiliation. This might sound like an incredibly simple and generic message to end this blog with, and to be honest it probably is, but I believe it's an important one.
In a way, what I'm trying to do on my profile here - which I'm not sure if I'll be successful at - is to defy these trends of drawing division lines around political affiliations and kind of create a group connected by... maybe even something as simple as gentle actions towards one another. It's kind of naive, I know, but noone can stop me from trying, right?
I hope you're all well and signing off for probably the final time before my return from vacation,
-Lilia. 
Some of my relatives have a completely different worldview and different political opinions to mine. Sometimes I wholeheartedly believe that the things they say are insane, dismissive and potentially dangerous if someone were to take those ideas too far. Other times, I agree with them, and I recognise that my "side" doesn't have all the answers. To be honest, they probably think exactly the same thing about how I see the world, too. We can all relate to the feeling of not understanding each other somehow, which is a bit funny, I must admit.
I can't really understand refusing to listen to a different political opinion, because from time to time those relatives of mine get things right and I get it completely wrong. Completely disregarding a whole other way of looking at life just because you *think* it's always going to be wrong is kind of ignorant in my opinion, so I try not to do that. Of course, if someone is being intentionally rude or abusive towards you, you are under no obligation to listen to them, but if they're just saying "hey, that's fine, props to you for having your own beliefs, but I personally think X and here's why" then I always try to give them a chance to get their point across before accusing them of being a bad person. That's just the way I do things, though.
Everyone has different beliefs and values. That's what makes their decision on politics. The one thing that everyone needs to remember is everything has a limit and is not infinite. That's is one of the fundamentals (unfundamentals) of life just like death and taxes.
5744901
Yeah, exactly. Of course, there could exist opinions and views I would never listen to or try to understand (e.g. that genocide is good or something insane like that), but they are few and far between.
But yeah, this is how a healthy discourse should work, after all - through swapping opinions peacefully in hopes of reaching consensus. Nowadays, at least in formal settings, this is incredibly rare though, and I feel like it's one of the reasons for the utter and constantly progressing polarisation of humanity we've been witnessing in the last couple of years. Again, I'm not someone who always "stands in the middle"; far from it, in fact, but I also believe that what we've been witnessing recently in regards to political discourse can be... legitmately dangerous, in many ways. I hope that makes sense, haha.
5744928
That's true, it is. I once wrote a small paper on what causes people to adopt the views they have; it was nothing groundbreaking, in fact it was very simple, general and relatively short, but I said there that it's not just that people view the ultimate abstract goal of "good for humanity" (with variations) differently, it's that they also want to reach it in various, often contradicting, ways. This is part of why there is such an immense variety of views around the world and why the Left-Right division alone is far too simplistic to accurately describe political discourse anymore.