Jagoda Marinić on ways to overcome growing radicalization

Jagoda Marinić is a writer and journalist who has been fighting for a more diverse society for many years. She now uses her experiences and makes clever suggestions, like we do online and offlineto emerge from the ever-increasing radicalization.

For me, gentle radicalism is the decision to really bring an idea or project into the world, instead of just using radicality to denounce those who think differently. If you want change, you have to find and win over those who are enthusiastic about a cause, instead of responding to radical things with the same kind of radicalism. This doesn't mean being weaker or being ignored, it just means that conditions that are supposed to change cannot get better if the people who want to improve them lose their values ​​and, yes, theirs along the way Lose gentleness.

Over the past 15 years I have often written and worked on the topics of minority rights and feminism, writing for emancipatory change in a society in which the balance of power seemed to be established. In fact, I started doing it while I was still studying. However, after a few years, I decided that I wanted to help shape the view of the world in which I live not only through lectures, books and conferences, but also through action. It may be that behind it was the desire to examine one's own ideas and utopias in terms of their feasibility and presentability, or perhaps it was just the naivety of believing that I could actually do something. Me, in the sense of each individual. This “making a difference” was not easy; it required a lot of learning from me and the people with whom I wanted to work and make things happen. But over time it became clear, or at least I had to realize, that movement does not arise because you demand it loudly, but because you quietly but persistently create experiences and spaces that change thinking and, in particular, trust in the changeability of things circumstances in which one lives. The more capable I and the people with whom I was allowed to implement ideas became, the more I moved away from the discursive radicalism that often sets the tone today, especially among many of my generation who are committed to democracy and human rights, the so-called perceived and tried to influence society primarily through discourses, debates and discussions. For some, a hot take became more important than the long-term impact of their thoughts and resulting actions.

Over the past decade, while both feminists and human rights activists have sought to praise and reclaim “anger” as a transformative force, I distanced myself from that emotion to the same extent that I managed to build something real. Anger seemed to me more like a corrosive force that primarily consumes those who think they need it in order to react credibly to injustice and denounce it. It got to the point that some even accused me of simply not having experienced enough marginalization to be able to understand anger, as if it required a willingness to publicly display emotions in order to be credible. In an emotionalized society, emotion becomes currency, what supposedly makes you authentic; it is not the argument that counts, but above all the emotion.

However, I quickly realized how much this emotion in particular was damaging me and pushing me into the role of victim. I looked for personalities whose thinking and writing had always influenced me and, not least in an interview by Toni Morrison, I found an attitude in which I felt confirmed in my distrust of anger mania: “Anger... is a paralyzing emotion... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate and igniting feeling – I don't think it's any of that – it's helpless… it's absence of control – and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers… and anger doesn’t provide any of that – I have no use for it whatsoever.”