Inferences of being a part of the world: unleashing self to the outside world, stepping out to a more extensive scape that the society has created, means we ought to eradicate fears of significant changes? Most of the time, yes, we ought to. Changes come in the most enigmatic circumstances at times (even the slightest bit; starting a destructive lifestyle and falling in love during teenage years still can be called significant changes, you feel it), and in the end, we are told to prepare anticipations for those said changes. Despite all that, it’s bluntly paradoxical that most youths are taught to be reactionaries. Not that I’m saying that being a reactionary is less profound than being a revolutionary, but the thing is, it’s a prevalent thing that the society implicitly propagates some sort of doctrine to youths to be “all the same” by not giving them the entitlement to think critically nor to have freedom of expression, to the point that they grow scared of being revolutionary/different/out-of-the-box because they’ve been told not to deviate from the norms and conformities or else they would encounter societal punishments in a form of judgments and ostracism.
For the record, whenever someone manifests a new way of thinking, or a new idea, or anything revolutionary — they also have to face the fears of ending up as a discrepant misfit because they are “different.” It has always been a chronicle that never ends, people kept on questioning and kvetching about it but in the end no one found the inherent answer about why does it never end.
I’ve come across and been a part of several revolutionary youth collectives that focus on sociopolitical issues (it’s an improvement to the world, really) and they mainly question the same thing too — how some reactionaries sometimes can grow atrocious by accepting damages of humanity as it is and refusing to make changes. As in, those people think that things like gender inequalities and stereotypes, political/religious extremism and bigotry, rape culture, racial/religious/ethnic discrimination, are normal and usual cultures that have been set by norms and therefore changes about them should not be made.
In some recent cases revolutionaries stand up to think critically by not just easily engulfing what those doctrines said, and trying to make a change about it by campaigning equality and justice so that inequalities and discrimination would be reduced, and then the end is mainly just the same, they get into polemics with the reactionaries who think they are being deviant by having different views; they fight and argue with no inherent ends because revolutionaries want to be heard and no matter how articulately they try to project their perspectives into the bigoted reactionaries they argue with, those bigots won’t just understand because it is indeed hard to change the perspectives of one if that person had implemented completely different views inside them. Norms and conformities were born through the development of culture, and culture itself is a social construct.
I really like this piece! What you say regarding people overcoming their complacency and changing the way they view the world is very true and can foster real change.