On Political Idealism and Embracing the Mess

Monolithic idealism is the enemy of change

It’s a very nippy day in Guelph, Ontario. I always underdress for winter, and many mistake that for Siberian endurance, though in reality, it’s closer to stoicism. As I explained to my friends, I don’t even know if my feet are actually comfortably warm—I have to consciously ask myself the question, hoping for an honest answer. During my childhood in Siberia, I learned that crying or complaining accomplished very little. But holding back tears like a little soldier could win you some twisted shreds of reluctant respect. In other words, you were rewarded for not being a problem.

I met up with my friends at a small vegan café on Wyndham Street. None of us lack critical thinking or dorkiness, so our discussions are typically lively and intense, filled with dark humor and silliness. Ash teaches university courses; during her Ph.D. she wrote a compelling dissertation analysing the history of racism in Canada. JC works in administration; her background is in visual arts, and she’s pursuing a Masters degree in Psychotherapy. We talked about life, ADHD, feminism, contrarianism, the cognitive abilities of plants, and current political events. Our conversations flowed seamlessly from one topic to the next, as we explored the recurring patterns connecting them all. Both Ash and JC are extremely observant and like asking difficult questions, which is why our conversations are so involved and rewarding.

When we started talking about social change, I expressed my concerns with the fragile state of democracy. I explained that current socio-political climate felt to me like a deja-vu. They both went silent for a few seconds, and curious, JC asked me to elaborate.

Born in the post-collapse Soviet Union, I witnessed how voting became obsolete, accompanied by a mind-boggling political shift in the Russian mentality. From the faint echoes of post-Soviet idealism, and into a state of apathetic, pessimistic indifference. Our president at the time, Boris Yeltsin was a “public embarrassment”. Political satire portrayed him as a chronic alcoholic.

Yeltsin was the first politician to understand that the Soviet Union was “finished” and can not be reformed; he tried to align Russia closer to the Western values, thus disrupting the status quo that remained as the aftermath of the Cold War. During the coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, Yeltsin had the courage to get on a tank, and call on Russians to stand up to the military. It was the finest moment of his life. But almost everything thereafter was, ultimately, a disappointment. Gradually, the apathy and the political indifference set in.

In the year 1999 Yeltsin resigned on national TV and endorsed Putin, de facto Russia’s second and the last president.

The things you could hear people say back then might seem dangerously familiar. Many decried voting as pointless: all politicians were bastards, so choosing didn’t matter. Walking to the voting polls, after all, was an effort and such effort was allegedly a waste of time. So many stopped coming to the polls, giving priority to things they could control like working or hobbies. As years went by, there were fewer and fewer jobs, and without money flowing in, it was hard to justify having hobbies.

My mother, an engineer hydrologist with an impressive resume of environmental fieldwork, gave up her career to become a janitor in a shopping center—much like how people today pivot to tech—because the job paid more. These choices were straightforward and practical, driven by factors within her control, yet they painted a vivid picture of a massive cultural shift underway.

By 2003, life in Russia had become unbearable. The pervasive sense of a “lack of future” compelled my parents to pursue professional immigration to Canada as skilled laborers.

Reflecting on it now, I realize that apathy comes with a cost—one that only becomes clear when the final bill arrives.

Alienation as Ideology

If you read between the lines, both capitalism and the current trajectory of technological advancement (driven by capitalism) are rooted in alienation. The secret sauce behind the world’s appearance of homogeneity, order, and systematization lies in the packaging of individuals, standalone products, talents, and identities into isolated, marketable units.

Consider food exports or building materials — delivered by trucks, stripped of their origins: the soil, the growers, the fields, the harvesters. Two trucks of lumber look identical even if one comes from Canada, and the other — from Argentina. One may even vote for tariffs against one or the other country without bothering to check who delivers the goods.

Or take synthetic “intelligence” (AI), which is, at its core, a poor version of anonymized, alienated and repackaged knowledge. Was it trained on texts by Karl Marx or on Mein Kampf? Who knows. Is this important? Look, it can tell you which mushrooms are poisonous and which—aren’t. It wouldn’t tell you what happened on January 6th, 2021 but it can write you an exercise plan.

These examples reveal how deeply alienation is woven into the fabric of our systems and how little we question it.

As Henry Ford observed in the early 20th century, assembly line work—where each worker focuses on a specific task rather than building an entire product from start to finish—proved advantageous because it significantly boosted employee productivity. This is also how the Manhattan project (atomic bomb) was built in 1942-1946 without compromising its anonymity. By concentrating on their individual tasks, workers (including teenage girls tasked with separating uranium) remained unaware that they were contributing to the creation of a weapon of mass destruction. The majority of them learned about the nature of their work after the bomb was dropped on Japan.

It’s crucial to highlight that systematization, and self-sustaining hierarchies are specific to humans. In nature, there is no such thing as imposed order—nature is inherently messy, and chaotic. Mutual thriving is achieved through cross-species collaboration and collective creation, rather than rigid structures of control.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud argued that humans invented technology to protect themselves from nature that is “cruel”, unpredictable and deadly. From constructing buildings to shelter against the elements to developing antibiotics to combat disease, technology serves as a protective barrier against the inevitability of suffering. And yet, the suffering did not disappear but amalgamated into self-sustaining and self-reproducing billion-dollar industries like real estate and big pharma.

Do you feel lonely? Maybe it is because you are too overweight? Too poor? Too confrontational? Maybe all you need to disappear for a month and re-emerge as the most interesting man/woman in the room?

Caught between the demands of self-improvement, the fitness and beauty industries, CBT therapists, self-help books like Rich Dad Poor Dad, and get-rich-quick schemes, we often lose sight of the true source of our distress. We’re presented with a myriad of disconnected remedies to choose from. The internet allows us to cocoon ourselves in whichever answer we settle on, offering endless validation and support forums for every possible struggle.

As products of alienation ourselves, we frown at the possibility of messiness or failure. We demonize inconsistency, imperfection, mistakes, and course correction. We embrace monolithic solution “packages”, because we crave the possibility of bettering our condition through self-sufficiency. “Lose 40 pounds in 60 days,” “Sleep with any woman by the end of this course,” or “Learn any language by practicing 10 minutes a day”. These slogans reflect our desire for quick, formulaic solutions within a world that prioritizes self-policing.

So lonely women commit to diets hoping it will fix them. Lonely men purchase pickup artist courses and flock to 4chan for validation. Those eager to learn a language commit to the 10-minutes-a-day systems without questioning their effectiveness. But are all languages equally easy to learn? Does repetitive practice work the same way for everyone? These assumptions go unchallenged, even though the answers are far from universal. One size doesn’t fit all.

We are fed the pervasive fantasy that we are the ones solely responsible for our own success, we are “defective” if we keep wallowing in misery, and we have full agency to fix ourselves. But what if the problem isn't within us, and by hyper-focusing on the easy solutionism we are just building another Manhattan project?

In The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing critiques the Western cultural obsession with the myth of “lone survivorship”—exemplified by figures like Robinson Crusoe and Rambo. As yet another manifestation of alienation, this myth, she argues, is fundamentally at odds with how the natural world works, as nothing can thrive in isolation. Similarly, in Making Kin, Donna Haraway emphasizes that on a damaged planet, forming connections—not only with one another but also with other life forms—requires the challenging and often painful labor of care.

For mutual flourishing to be possible, we must abandon both rigid, monolithic ways of thinking and the seductive urge to escape into fantasies of alienation and systemic detachment. Instead, we must embrace the messy, interconnected realities that demand our attention and care.

But how is this essay at all about political idealism, you might ask? These days, like back in the early 2000s Russia, it's common to hear things like “all politicians are bastards” and therefore, “politics don't matter”, but in truth, we live in a chaotic, dynamic environment where change may suddenly come out of nowhere and new options may become available without warning. These options may never become apparent if we remain disengaged, because systems of control rely on alienation and division.

During the pandemic, the landlords of one of Toronto's residential buildings began delaying repair requests in an attempt to provoke evictions and raise rent prices. When this strategy failed, they resorted to issuing renoviction notices to every tenant in the building—which they could not legally do. The scheme was only uncovered because tenants began communicating with one another and expressing their concerns, which eventually led to a class action lawsuit.

This example highlights an important lesson: to understand the bigger picture, we must actively break down barriers. We need to embrace partial solutions and compromises, choosing cooperation in order to get to the next destination. We don't have to commit to the entire journey all at once, and changing our minds along the way doesn’t make us any less.

Many justify their reluctance to engage in democracy or their choice of an ill-fitting political candidate because of alienated self-deception (e.g., an immigrant believing that they are spared from the policies targeting immigrants) or monolithic thinking where a solution has to be ticking all the boxes to be viable (e.g., “I can’t support Kamala because of her underwhelming stance on Israel-Palestine conflict”).

Sometimes all we have to do is choose the fastest train that gets us to the next destination. But we have to remember that we aren't travelling alone. The trip will be messy, complicated, and full of conversations, and this is so much better than travelling alone in an empty train headed straight off a cliff.