I remember at my college graduation, one of the student speeches being about following your passion. It’s an event that stands out, but it’s far from the only time I’ve encountered impassioned words about “being yourself” or “following your passion” or other words along those lines. How these adages are supposed to function in reality has yet to be explained to me. Oh sure, people can titter and giggle and say “be yourself, unless you’re a jerk, then don’t,” as if hand waving away the emptiness of the words. But taking seriously what such a simple failure of the saying implies would mean taking seriously that the western imperialist order has no such space for people to be themselves and has no actual meaningful interest in them doing it.

Am I supposed to “be myself” who has little interest in spending on empty material products, who has little desire to compete with others for scraps, who mostly just wants some interdependent community like most people in history had or have before the colonizers said “no, no, no that might allow you to organize against the exploitative order of things”? Am I supposed to be myself like the students at Kent State of the past who were killed for protesting? Or like the kids in Gaza who never got a chance to be themselves, were called “Hamas” and genocided?

And this is not even getting into the other aspect of the being one’s self, that a significant part of who we are is influenced from our environment and that we change over time. I did not always have the views on imperialism that I do, for example. I could “be myself” of the past and I would be a person that “be myself” of now would have some serious questions for.

And what of passion, well, what if my passion is that “follow your passion” is terrible advice. Should I still follow it? Is liberalism really so trite as to tell people “just do whatever and it’ll hold together somehow?” Given some people don’t seem to take the Paradox of Tolerance seriously, I have to figure some liberals really are that trite and ineffectual at engaging with the dynamics of reality.

Since that speech I heard at my college graduation, among hearing it again in other ways and other forms, I’ve also heard avoidance of talking about the system in other directions. In dating spheres, for example, people will say things like, “Become the person you’d want to date and then it will work.” Nowhere in such statements is it addressed, the specter of rampant financial insecurity, lack of community, ideological splintering, and patriarchal and gender binary dynamics that insert an enormous amount of stress, fear, and sometimes real danger into what is portrayed at least as a process that is supposed to be fun and enjoyable for both people.

Oh, you’ll hear the occasional misogyny-induced rant about how it’s a problem with women or something, but rarely do these things get talked about in the context of how they’re affecting most people. Most of the time it is steered into how they are affecting you and what you are supposed to do about that, so long as what you want to do doesn’t question the system too hard. It is such an all-encompassing mode of thinking that you can see in so many areas once you start looking for it.

“Ok, but what are you going to do about this?”

Not asked like an activist trying to recruit you to the cause, but like it is now your responsibility to single-handedly solve the problem if you complain about the problem. After all, it’s your problem, right? That’s what the individualist thinking says. “It must be your problem if you’re bringing it up. It couldn’t be mine too. All of this is happening in isolation, of course!”

And the true avoidance of responsibility goes on. Not the avoidance of “personal” responsibility that the individualists harp on endlessly about while ignoring the people who are working multiple jobs to make ends meet. Rather, the avoidance of collective responsibility, which western colonizers have been taught is akin to being told you must dress in a potato sack and move down the street like a marionette with others, your head empty of any and all thoughts. Meanwhile, in actual reality, the individualists don’t even want their thoughts half the time because of how dark the cloud of imperialism and its consequences is.

And we get consumer products to blot out the thoughts with, blot out the pain. “Follow your passion”… why yes, thank you, I will follow my passion of doing what I can to help with liberating humanity from the shackles of imperialism and the crushing weight of the empty, nihilistic “person in a dark room staring at their reflection with the walls sound-proofed to shut out the noises of children being bombed” obsession with the self that is individualism. I will do my best to help in dismantling that, indeed.