Dave5

I finally sat down and read Exiting The Vampire Castle by Mark Fisher. As with all Fishers work, I feel sad that I’m only coming to it 10+ years after it was written. It is a deeply clarifying piece of writing. In my mind it paints the fecklessness of Western Leftist “activism” is a way that really resonated (and a way that my conservative friends would probably agree with). Take the 15 mins out and read it for yourself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exiting_the_Vampire_Castle

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/

An additional “ooooooh fuck!” moment for me was his description of privilege:

The privilege I certainly enjoy as a white male consists in part in my not being aware of my ethnicity and my gender¹, and it is a sobering and revelatory experience to occasionally be made aware of these blind-spots. But, rather than seeking a world in which everyone achieves freedom from identitarian classification, the Vampires’ Castle seeks to corral people back into identi-camps, where they are forever defined in the terms set by dominant power, crippled by self-consciousness and isolated by a logic of solipsism which insists that we cannot understand one another unless we belong to the same identity group.

1. Emphasis mine. It matches both my lived experience and the conscious feeling I have. I feel wealthiest when I can walk into a supermarket and buy what ever I want without worrying about the cost. It’s the “without worrying” that is the privilege. ↩︎