There’s this red sails article that pops up every once in a while. Don’t get me wrong it’s a fine article, but there’s a bit that goes “something something don’t think people are brainwashed and just need to be exposed to uncomfortable truths.”
And like, I get it. But…that’s exactly what happened to me. I mean, I’m not going to say it was exactly one thing that caused it. However, genuinely when i learned about the Iraq War in detail*, that was basically what flipped the switch in my head. Obviously I wasn’t as theoretically developed as I am today, but thats what made me genuinely want to read Marx, Lenin, Mao, etc. It was exactly that process of being exposed to information like that that made me want to be a communist, and want to fight for it.
This isn’t some debunking thing. I think what I’m trying to explain is that my story seems to be very different from other people’s, and applying my own experiences might not really work if it’s not how things commonly work.
And, as much as it is important, I do want something more in depth than just “organize and educate.” Don’t get me wrong, that’s good advice. What I’m trying to ask moreso is, what is the actually psychology going on behind these decisions here? Obviously there’s no cookie cutter/one size fits all strategy here, but some direction would be helpful in actually attempting to convince people.
*To elaborate, I always heard of Iraq as just “the war.” Kinda like how Vietnam was. But no one ever explained to me what it was and school didn’t really neither. So when I learned it was basically the US invading Iraq almost explicitly for oil and no one got punished for it and basically everyone got rich off of it besides normal people while hundreds of thousands Iraqis died, it really shook me.
I hate that redsails article because it really is just an exercise in pedantic semantics. It sets up a straw man for what brain washing is and beats it into the ground. Propaganda works. It isn’t fool proof but brainwashing is a thing.
Even a bad lie can obfuscate the truth a little so they repeat the lies over and over.
The subconscious mind has safeguards to protect the well being of the body and conscious mind. Being able to reject information without examining it fully is an essential ability or people would never be able to make decisions in a crisis. Rejecting information that opposes your personal interests isn’t a conscious decision.
Keeping the working class impoverished keeps peoples brains in crisis mode in order to curtail peoples ability to think things through.
With no time to think it out, a personal interest in rejecting the truth and and hearing 10 lies for every truth people are brain washed, or maybe its better to say they are “brain filthy.”
Because people don’t work like that trust me Ive tried and I give up the only their minds change is if it’s splattered on the floor
People need to want to change. If they wanna stay where they are intellectually, you are right. They change when they are dead. But the point is, how do we get them to want to change?
Except people keep asking “how do I get my racist as fuck uncle to be a super based communist” or “how do I get my Neo Nazi brother whose got racist steam names to consider my view” and I have to keep reminding them that if they don’t want to change theres nothing you can do about it cut your losses you can give these people the most logical argument in the world worthy of a Nobel prize but if they don’t want to listen you’re wasting your energy
So what comes to mind here is, changes are often not dramatic and take time to formulate, but this doesn’t mean they don’t occur.
Consider it this way: If a single conversation could change a devout liberal into a budding communist, couldn’t a single conversation also change them back from a budding communist into a devout liberal again?
Our belief systems need a kind of process to them in order for us to have some kind of stability to how we perceive the world and how we act in it. So when someone has a belief challenged and when they are open enough to be considering that challenge, they are not just considering the challenge itself; they are also considering what the challenge implies about other beliefs they have, what the newly formed synthesis would imply about them as a person and how they act in the world, what it would imply about other people around them, what feelings it evokes in them, and so on. This is not to say everybody is doing this all consciously for every single challenge to a belief they encounter. But that they are likely going through some form of this process when evaluating information and beliefs and are probably doing it in more conscious detail, the more significant a challenge it is to their existing framework of belief.
So with this in mind and from the standpoint of what we can do as individuals in the world, we shouldn’t expect dramatic, instantaneous change, but instead try to form relationships (where reasonable, I am not asking people to befriend nazis) and be firm on what we believe and why where disagreements come up. Sometimes the first step may simply be the other person accepting that we have dramatically different beliefs and are also not a scary creature from under the bed (notice how some imperialist propaganda specifically tries to get people to consider any and all anti-imperialist dialogue as belonging to a scary faction, such as when people are called “Russian trolls/agents”). Once they’ve accepted we’re not a scary creature from under the bed, then they may be able to start considering what we’re saying. I won’t pretend this is a system-level solution, but when we’re talking about dealing with it in a disorganized manner where we don’t have party power.
These people are delusional lmao, if they can’t accept reality then theres really nothing you can do to convince them otherwise it’s better mental wise to cut your losses
Really depends on the situation. I’m not going to insist to someone that they associate with a person who is a drain on them, sans context. But speaking generally, in the imperial core, we often don’t have the luxury to be especially selective on who we associate with, if we want to make any headway on things. Most are not exactly ML and those of us who made our way to that did it because there were people who were willing to associate with us in spite of our ignorance and get through to us over time.
Removed by mod
What you’re saying sounds a lot like encouraging barbarism in the imperial core, in the hope it will somehow make it collapse faster. Which is accelerationism and is not how revolution is built. Worsening contradictions don’t automatically translate to socialist revolution, in the imperial core or anywhere. It still has to be built and people in the imperial core can still try to build and prepare locally, while trying to have solidarity internationally as well. It is counter to having an internationalist view to throw local under the bus simply because it isn’t as revolutionary as you’d like. It is counter to having empathy in general as well.
Furthermore, the western empire is not a controlled house of cards confined within a sterilized chamber. If it collapses violently, and there is nothing significant to counter that locally, it’s still an empire with far-reaching tendrils that has nukes and other kinds of militarized violence. Don’t confuse a controlled implosion with a violent explosion, in other words. Even from this point of view of people who live in the imperial core that seems to saying “their lives matter less than those in the ‘third world’”, their downfall is not confined to only them. And if imperialism can get dismantled to the point that that’s no longer the case, the (already flimsy) argument for valuing “third world” lives more also goes out the window, since the “first world” is no longer able to exploit those people in the same way at that point anyway.
Except I don’t want a revolution in the imperial core I want their hegemony to collapse I don’t care if it’s violent I want to live in a multipolar world order since it’s magnitudes better than the current one also yes in the grand scheme their lives are lesser to me I don’t care about them
So you don’t care if indigenous people in the region that gets called the US suffer? You don’t care if children in the imperial core more broadly, suffer? You don’t care if the collapse of the empire harms people outside it in the process? You’re going to turn around and say that people who have not done harm are deserving of harm by association, is that it? What kind of sick shit are you peddling to sit here and tell me that some lives are lesser?
I think that, historically, the average person practiced politics through their social life. Like most members of the kpd/spd weren’t reading and critiquing the major socialist writers of their day, they were a member of the same party as their coworkers, their neighbors, their parents, etc. This is what makes organizing in a modern context so frustratingly difficult - capitalism has destroyed all of those social clubs, most aggressively the communist parties and trade unions, and the only ones with an ounce of power that are left are the ones that are inherently reactionary in some way, like the police unions.
So with this as my hypothesis, my thought is that to meaningfully change people’s politics you have to change their social life. For someone like me who is deeply connected to the internet it was enough to spend a lot of time simulating social interaction on a website and slowly getting warmed up to the phrase “Joseph Stalin saved the world from fascism”, but for people who are not that strongly connected to an online forum their real connections with real people have to be what pushes them in that direction.
This is actually a reason for why I want to build up my social life. It’s hard to work on building socialism if you don’t have a social life
True, I would like to do that as well. Since I’m a bit of a loner it’s not the easiest of things, but I’m sure that with a bit of patience and perseverance we can do that.
Inshallah my sibling. I’ve putting myself out there more. Going out alone and suggesting to my friends and family places to go out to. I’m going to the gym more as well and meet people there as well.
Someone start a TikTok trend to get Gen Alpha to read the Communist Manifesto.
We need Stalin AI edits of whatever the present day viral meme is, imagine how many new comrades we would have if Stalin said ‘six seven brain rot slop we are charlie kirk’
