Beautiful World, Where Are You

by Sally Rooney

People think that socialism is sustained by force—the forcible expropriation of property—but I wish they would just admit that capitalism is also sustained by exactly the same force in the opposite direction, the forcible protection of existing property arrangements.

but our political vocabulary has decayed so deeply and rapidly since the twentieth century that most attempts to make sense of our present historical moment turn out to be essentially gibberish.

But looking at the internet, I don’t see many ideas worth dying for. The only idea on there seems to be that we should watch the immense human misery unfolding before us and just wait for the most immiserated, most oppressed people to turn around and tell us how to stop it.

I also feel certain it’s better to be deeply loved (which you are) than widely liked

I feel so frightened of being hurt—not of the suffering, which I know I can handle, but the indignity of suffering, the indignity of being open to it.

For me (and maybe only for me) it would be a sort of sick, insane thing to do, a way of mutilating my real life as a gesture of submission to an imagined future. I don’t want to belong to a political movement that makes me view my own body with suspicion and terror.

And I want that—to prove that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care.