1. The world does not become better by all of us being our best selves. That’s because there are things in the world that are the citizenship equivalent of taking out the trash. A world in which duty is justified by passion is ultimately a world without real citizens. A thread.

2. Sure it’s great if you find something you love and are good at, and, as long as that’s not doing harm, so much the good for all. That’s the basic premise of liberalism: everyone do their thing and stay out of others’ way. The world flourishes through aggregate flourishing.

3. But there are a few things this gets wrong. The most obvious is a key insights of third wave feminism: that the flourishing of the privileged often comes at the expense and labor of the marginalized. Someone has to take out the trash while the hero writes the masterpiece.

4. But there’s another piece too which isn’t just about inequality: it’s about how that inequality is narrated and understood. This gets into the the ideology of meritocracy, an understanding that those who don’t do the proverbial taking out the trash deserve the privilege.

5. This means that those who do have to do the hard work not only are forced to justify their work as somehow being their passion (or else why do they do it?) but they also have to explain their inequality as somehow their own lack of effort/talent/etc. As others do about them.

6.This isn’t just a matter of economic emergence and what an ideology of the invisible hand can do to make those in shitty jobs feel shittier. It also extends to broader questions of citizenship: Why get involved? Well because you love it of course. But what if you don’t love it?

7. If you don’t love registering voters, then just watch a show. Be your best self! This leaves the work of politics to narcissists, those holding onto power, the few for whom solidarity really is a passion, and the people who need political change or they will keep suffering.

8. TL/DR: sometimes citizenship requires work that isn’t fun and doesn’t excite passions. That this is even remotely provocative as a claim is indicative of a level of privileged lack of political necessity and a liberal ideology of emergent goods driven by passions not duties.

This rant is basically my next book by the way