> This is how I view the world and it is why it upsets me when people voice concern about crime in a city or something like that and people respond with "ACKSHU

> This is how I view the world and it is why it upsets me when people voice concern about crime in a city or something like that and people respond with "ACKSHUALLY" followed by some sort of statistic. It feels like people just want to stay stuck but as the author says "to see that a better world is possible, we need to see that both are true at the same time: the world is awful, and the world is much better." I don't think people "want to stay stuck". I think it is simply the state of our polarized polity, and the mistrustful, zero-sum approach to discourse that it breeds. Even a plain factual statement feels like it's signaling some political allegiance or pushing some agenda, and that feels threatening. I'm not placing myself above this phenomenon, either. Your choice of example fact – something about 'crime in a city' – feels like a right-wing shibboleth (and after all, even if there are objective facts, the particular facts we recognize as salient, the narrative patterns of fact that we use to make political arguments, are of course driven by our values and political allegiances). Maybe I'm off-base about your example, but really my point is that it feels that way, so discussions of politics feel scary, even when they stick to matters of putatively objective fact. Apologies for shoehorning in the Israel/Palestine issue, but I thought this piece[1] was eloquent on (something like) this phenomenon: > [...]if, as many feel at this moment, the recognition of one “side” comes at the expense of the other, the expression of empathy for one is the refusal of empathy for another. Many seem to feel that no hand is bare—that all hands are holding knives, pointing in opposite directions. This moment is characterized by a widespread conviction that recognition can only go in one direction: that any show of empathy toward Israelis is tantamount to supporting the oppression of Palestinians, and that any show of empathy toward Palestinians is tantamount to supporting the massacre on October. > Those who subscribe to this dichotomy see attempts to recognize all suffering as disingenuous and manipulative. They sometimes complain that symmetrical empathy entails symmetrical judgment, symmetrical condemnation, or attribution of symmetrical power. And since they reject these equivalences, they reject the equivalence of empathy. [1] https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/letter-from-israel/ https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/letter-from-israel/