I’ve spent the last few years devouring Soviet history. Books, papers, blog posts, podcasts, all of it. I can’t get enough. Not to brag, but I do feel as though I’ve achieved a certain level of understanding about the USSR, its history, and eventual collapse. But I’ve also put the work in.
And yet, whenever I engage people I know IRL or online, I’m amazed by how doggedly people will defend what they just inherently “know”: that the Soviet Union was an evil totalitarian authority dictatorship that killed 100 million of its own people and eventually collapsed because communism never works. None of these people (at least the people I know IRL) have learned anything about Soviet history beyond maybe a couple days of lectures and a textbook chapter in high school history classes. Like, I get that this is the narrative that nearly every American holds in their heads. The fact that people believe this isn’t surprising. But what is a little surprising to me is that, when confronted with a challenge to that narrative from someone they know has always loved history and has bothered to learn more, they dig their heels in and insist they are right and I am wrong.
This isn’t about me, I’m just sharing my experience with this. I’m just amazed at how Americans will be completely ignorant about a topic (not just the USSR) but will be utterly convinced their views on that topic are correct, despite their own lack of investigation into that topic. This is the same country where tens of millions of people think dinosaurs and humans walked around together and will not listen to what any “scientist” has to say about it, after all.
When I was still a young liberal and nowhere near a leftist, I did the same: "Wizard's First Rule" was recommended to me by an adult because I seemed so very smart for my age according to them.
I didn't even finish the book because in my gut it horrified me, even the narcissistic arrogance of the "first rule" itself:
The cheap trick of that is telling the reader that they're very smart and a wizard if only they read the book and nod along to the message, and everyone else is inferior because they're not part of the secret not-Randian Randian secret club.
It's very telling to me that the @TheOneAndOnly@lemm.ee is believing exactly what they want to believe and refuse to see evidence put right in front of their face from the author himself.
I had to go through my edgy atheist phase before I wised up. That rule and the sixth one “the only sovereign you can allow to rule you is reason” were almost Sam Harris-esque, so naturally I continued to think they were brilliant. Took a few years to go from that to ML, and realizing what those books were was a big step.
It's fucking rich that the kind of people that decide for the rest of us what "reason" is tend to be the ones peddling cryptocurrency grifts and seasteading escapist fantasies, or just rob each other in the name of "Effective Altruism" like Sam Bankman-Fried.