Also akin to this is what I call a “consumerist” approach to ideas. It’s not an approach of saying, “Do ideas actually correspond to reality?”—but, rather, “Do I like them?” It’s like you’re shopping for shoes or going to a movie. “Do I like this, or do I not like this?” I read a report where a copy of the film of the Dialogue with Cornel West was sent to someone who’s an intellectual, and they wrote back and said, “Well, you know, there’s a little too much passion in this for my taste.” I mean, we could spend the rest of our time here (and a long time beyond) talking about what’s wrong with that. First of all, it was pointed out to this person: This is not really a matter of taste—people are talking about what’s happening to real people in the real world. And it was also pointed out: Your taste, by the way, can change, it can change based on what you understand. This is something we really have to struggle with people about, because you run into this all the time. Here again is epistemology and morality. People find a way to dismiss things that make them uncomfortable, by acting like a consumer. And we have to challenge not only the particularity of what’s wrong with the way they respond to a specific thing, but the whole methodology and the whole approach. We have to tell them: “Look, I’m sorry, but that’s not an acceptable way to go through the world, that’s not an acceptable way to approach life, to decide whether something’s to your taste or not. And, frankly, it’s rather parasitic, too. You have the privilege to sit there and decide on a basis like that. People who are being shot down in the street, or people whose kids are starving, don’t have the luxury of deciding on that basis. They may have all kinds of wrong ideas, but they don’t have the luxury of deciding whether basic things about reality are to their taste or not.”

Now it’s not that we should jack people up—“you petit bourgeois asshole,” or whatever—but we should be struggling with people. This is not an acceptable way to approach life and to approach ideas. Is it true, or not true? If it’s true, it should be to your taste—or, if it’s not to your taste, you should change it. If there’s something about reality that you find distasteful, then you should go about changing that reality—and we’ll argue with you, too, about whether you should find it distasteful or not, if we don’t agree. But that’s the question: Is it true or not, and then what do you do about it? We have to struggle with people, straight up, that this is the way you have to approach the world.

“Who are you to say that this is the way we have to approach the world?” Well, we can struggle about that, too. It’s like what’s said in Birds and Crocodiles [Birds Cannot Give Birth to Crocodiles, But Humanity Can Soar Beyond the Horizon²⁹]: “Who are you to say?” is the wrong question here. It’s not “who are we?”—the question is what is the reality. What is the way to understand and engage with reality and change reality? That’s the question, not who are you or who are we.

29. Bob Avakian, Birds Cannot Give Birth to Crocodiles, But Humanity Can Soar Beyond the Horizon. From a talk given in 2010. Available as an eBook from insight-press.com. Also available at revcom.us.[ return ]