Yesterday had a long conversation with a labor aristrocratic family member, age millenial and working in tech.
He announced things like: -China is a horrible Orvellian surveillance state, you (talks to me) have no idea how horrible it is there. Haven't you seen the videos?
I try to cautiously reply that surveillance capitalism is pretty intense in the West as well and that we don't really get good or balanced information from China. He goes:
-So you sayig something like Zero Covid was the right choice?
I am hesitant to reply with a yes as this person is clearly already very fired up and confrontational. But I try to point out things about how nobody in 2020 knew how bad it might and how many will die, how people in the West are still dying, how the virus isn't in any way bening even now and how it's pretty dystopian too that here we are just sacrificing people for capitalism now and choose to ignore it.
I did say I think it was better to save people to which he said that I am a nihilist.
I also tried to explain the State outside the capitalist project and protecting multitudes not individuals, individualism and such, but he was not receiving it.
He then told me how bad the country is as he saw in the Grand Tour how they have built a highway over a rainforest that nobody uses.
I asked him where does he think all the roads and buildings in the West are built if not on top of nature. The argument as critizism of China made no sense to me whatsoever.
Later this same person said to me that we as a society have no hope and there is no point in protesting, no point in doing anything but riding out the rest of our time to climate disaster. I tried to point out to him that a socialist state can be born from capitalism, but only if we the people develop initiative for it and understand our current condition.
Same guy also did admit that voting no longer works, the EU was a mistake and it's grim how all our state systems have been privatized and are now in the hands of corpotations like Microsoft.
Now, I don't even know where to start with this one. He very much represents his part of the population here and the deep apathy and negative thought that they harbor.
He still understands and thinks that the regulated capitalism of the 70-80s here (keynesian) was the best part of our history, but when I told him that it still was always going to lead to fascism and monopolies (told him to read Marx) he ignored this. Very much the "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" mindset.
And my question is, how do we as communists reach these people? These people actually have power (capital), but the petty bourge status has made them like this. However climate chance does not discriminate so I feel this part of society is facing a new conflict from a historical standpoint where nature says no to exploitation. And this seems to lead to apathy.
The most effective response I've seen to that when it comes to shutting them up is confronting them with their own premise: so are they. If our consciousness, the first thing that we experience when we wake up every day as conscious beings is some sort of illusion, that illusion is all that we know. All of that Rick and Morty tier reductionist nihilism is just an elaborate cope on their part because they are alienated and disconnected from other people and at the same time have an excessively high opinion of their own importance as what they call "meat computers" because capitalists pay them more. Calling out that cope is effective because that's what it is. They think that by reducing others to the crudest possible terms that they stand above the heap of everyone else. Calling out that arrogance often makes them back the fuck down again.
They bubble up here on Hexbear from time to time and they're exhausting each and every time. Debating them is as exhausting and futile as debating any typical Reddit techbro so just calling out the most likely ulterior motive (feeling superior to other "meat computers" by wallowing in reductionist nihilism and dragging others down and pushing them under themselves) works better and takes less effort.
This is a very good idea. I talk about things being social constructs with him all the time and he tends to get very frustrated with this, with the whole "but there has to be something concrete, something that is true".
We are currently sort of stuck in the struggle session of Western media and bias, the way our worldview is indeed constructed and I do sympathize with the uncertainty that might come from being ok with most things not being black&white or clearly right or wrong. True or false etc. I told him that for me personally realizing this was freeing, he also called me a nihilist on that.
Problem is that when I make a comment about something like the LLMs from a social sciences pov he immeadiately dismisses it because I am not in tech and says "you don't understand the threat because you don't understand what AI is". I try to explain that in the end your AI is just automation and statistics, not intelligence and he dismisses it.
For some reason the tech bro mindset produces people with exceptional confidence in their own understanding of the world and that is very hard to counter. But at the same time tech is working in the closest alliance with capitalism and imo it is the industry that is also doing a lot of class betrayal (unconscious as it may be). Which is why I think these are the people we would need to reach somehow.
That's a side issue that disturbs me with a lot of the same people, too: "if it can't be measured in a laboratory environment, it does not exist" logical positivism takes. Academia generally dismisses the entire concept because logical positivism itself as a concept can not itself be measured in a laboratory environment, but it keeps popping up because of the weird fear/rejection of anything that isn't yet another computer to touch.
Instead of the humility of accepting that there is some ambiguity to the world and many unknowns in the interconnected universe we live in, it's "no, it must be like computer, computer I can touch, or else it is stupid and bad and doesn't exist so stop talking about it GET SCHWIFTY." I think it's why so many of those same people can't even begin to explore ethical concepts and just sum it up as "morals" in a crude reductionistic way and dismiss the concept whenever it's inconvenient in favor of more treats.
Yup. I also think there is a discussion to be had about "evidence-based" and the problem of science turning into a sort of religion.
Looking at the entire covid response where nothing could be done until it had been proven over and over again by one of the methods these types of guys see as valid.
I work a lot with narratives or otherwise less colonial research methods and typically these measures get discredited from the start. I think this is related to everything you pointed out there.