Comradeship // Freechat

I decided long ago to use the most effective cognitive tools for navigating my world and to discard tools that led to undesirable outcomes. I gave up on many tools early in life like superstition and religion, picked up tools like science and philosophy, and then I got stuck. I tried tools like zazen meditation and yoga and got a little progress but not much. I tried zen koans and the tao te ching to much the same result. Then I rediscovered Ethics and found a new set of tools that I had previously discarded.

And still there were major cognitive problems that I could not resolve internally. Then I discovered critical theory and started diving in, surveying everything, suddenly understanding why there were entire schools of thought that previously had seemed so esoteric and inscrutable to me. I still didn't understand these things but I had a mental model to approach them finally. I made no commitments but tried a few schools of thought and it seemed random whether or not I got useful insights. And then I traced back things all the way to Marx and Engels and then rebuilt my understanding using dialectical materialism and discovered it to be incredibly effective and consistent.

I didn't decide to become a Marxist, I became a Marxist the same way I had previously become an adopter of any school of thought - I continue to seek useful and effective ways of being and Marxism has been the best thus far.