Everything Is Political

Expansion

Last time I explained why I was rebranding this newsletter/blog to Everything Is Political. As it says on the About page: “Because it is. Every choice we make, everything we buy. There is no escaping from it. The whole of life is entwined with politics just as it is with nature.”

I’m going to expand on that slightly.

The phrase is obviously related to the feminist slogan “The personal is political” and reinforces it, whilst also expanding its scope.

Politics is views and perspectives, and those form belief systems, and our belief systems affect action.

Everything is from a viewpoint. That's part of why objectivity is impossible. That viewpoint becomes our world view.

Values seem invisible when held by a person, just as we may think our voice has no accent. They are even more likely to be invisible if our own world view matches that of mainstream society. It leads to illusion that those things are “normal” not “political”.

One person sees a book, film or game as “just entertainment, keep politics out”. But another sees the nationalistic flags, the fact that there are no women except as victims, and the focus on weapons and killing as the primary ways of solving problems. That second person sees the politics which are invisible to the first.

All the content is politics. Just because it is unquestioned and unobserved by one person, the politics are there all the same.

When people say “keep politics out of this [thing]” they mean “make the politics the same as mine, so I don’t notice it”.

In 2002 I worked for a university. It sent a weekly email of news and events to all staff and students. I asked the compiler to include a mention of a peace gathering that was due to take place on campus. The email always included local events and groups. But the person who administered the weekly email refused, and said they wouldn’t include my entry because it was “too political”. Opposition to killing people was “too political” for a UK university to mention. (Business as usual.)

Except not promoting that message was also political, based on the worldview that killing is acceptable.

And there was an extra level of hypocrisy, since the university would mention things to do with celebrating soldiers, even holding silences for them. They would list events that included exploitation of other species, destruction of the environment, promotion of capitalism and so on. None of those were deemed “political” because the administration endorsed those values.

Once you realise everything is political, you can see it, analyse it, understand the bias in everything human-created.

It is similar to the way that, once you understand conformity, you can recognise and resist it. Once you see how advertising manipulates the truth and misleads us, you can become resistant to it. But the first step is seeing the thing that was in front of you all along.

As some of you know, I’m also an author, and like to say something with my fiction. In an article from the sci-fi journal Vector (issue 291, summer 2020), “Living among the Leviathans: Robert S. Malan interviews Stewart Hotston,” Stewart made this point:

“In the end all storytelling is political. There is no ‘entertainment only’ version of storytelling because for someone in the audience the axioms others take for granted are painful, disempowering and even oppressive. Only those who are privileged to the point of being blind to their own world view can see stories as being (a)political. So science fiction is political, and because of its natural bent to look at the ‘what ifs’ of the world, its biases become magnified. If it extrapolates only what the majority or a particular interest group are evangelising, fine –but it should expect to get scoured in the court of public opinion. In my mind science fiction which doesn’t consciously explore politics is a failure of a curious kind, because it is certainly exploring politics unconsciously!”

The part I emphasised in bold is a more concise summary of what I’ve been trying to say. (Thank you Stewart!)

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Further Quotes Since I originally Wrote This Post

“All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.”

—George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946.

All art is political. It either opposes the madness of the status quo, supports it, or distracts from it. Creating vapid diversions for people to sedate themselves with in a genocidal brainwashed dystopia on a dying world is a political act, whether you call it political or not.

An artist who says they “avoid politics” while living in the heart of a murderous tyrannical empire is lying. They don’t avoid politics. They are directly participating in politics. And they are participating on the wrong side.

All art either helps open people’s eyes or helps close them. Almost all art in mainstream culture helps close them — either by normalizing and celebrating the madness of this civilization, or by numbing people to the discomfort of it. This is not just political, it’s on the front line of politics.

—Caitlyn Johnstone