Why should I care? Or why punks are correct and old wise philosophers are wrong

The article was something of a tribute to the author of => https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-completion-...

> Violence is not mentioned even once.

It's mentioned at the start:

Our entire social contract boils down to, “I promise not to kill you if you promise not to kill me.” There’s nothing more to it.

That said, I agree that the author subsequently ignores the implications of this, which makes his conclusions rather meaningless in my view.

— “Why punks are correct and old wise philosophers are wrong” is a trap in the same way “have you stopped beating your wife?” is. Assuming that punks and philosophers (inevitably painted as old and wise men) are a disjoint set is a newbie blunder or attempt at clickbait by putting together two words that would seem vaguely at odds to a philosophically unsophisticated mind.

Of course, philosophers can be punk (Nietzsche, Marx); punks can absolutely be old and/or wise; all philosophers were young at some point, some of them (Hume, Plato) wrote famous works before they were “old and wise”; a system of thought can be considered philosophy, and varieties of punk at their best are systems of thought; and, very much like philosophy, there is no “punk” as a single homogenous system of thought.

— “If I am free, why do I have to defend my actions against a specific body of people and doctrines?” You don’t, in the sense of some specific body of people. You do, in the sense that you do not exist in vacuum: self-awareness automatically requires the other that the self can be set apart from. What you call your “oppressors” are both 1) parts of the same whole that you are part of and 2) bring yourself as an entity into being in the first place. It doesn’t mean that you can’t be oppressed and shouldn’t work to address that; but it does mean that yes, being a human automatically means having to exist among other humans and act in ways that are not only concerning yourself. I’d be a bit normative and say you probably shouldn’t see everyone else as “oppressing” you just because you have to consider how your actions affect them.

God's not dead.

The article says this: “Taking an active stance on political issues is just a small part of the obligations we acquire as humans, citizens, parents, employees, residents of some apartment block, and so on. And our free time… They might as well outlaw it.”

This sounds like the core complaint in the article and it leaves me utterly perplexed. Most people live their entire lives, without ever having what i would call an active stance on any political issue. Even the very few who are politicaly active (go to protests, organise) do it only occasionally. Most of their time they are doing other things (working, eating, sleeping, hanging out with friends, reading, whatever). And then there are very few who do activism or politics professionally and full time. This is not the norm but the exception.

So then why does the author think that they are obliged by society to take an “active stance on political issues”? Where is this notion comming from?

Maybe they have parents or a friend group who are politically very active and they live in a distorted bubble where they are made to feel not worthy if they don’t care that much? Or maybe their personal definition of “active stance on political issue” has a very low bar?