With Putin talking about the orthodox church being holy and using to justify some conservative bullshit, all I can remember was the bolsheviks going around the country proudly declaring that cities were now "officially godless" and redistributing the church's gold amongst the people and using it to pay for electrification projects.

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
      ·
      4 years ago

      this is an interesting point, and kind of scary, if true. the idea that one’s most deeply held convictions are reinforced memetically like that. Makes me think of the old phrase “fake it til you make it” but with much more concerning implications

      It is scary. It can be used positively, and it's a common facet of self-help snake oil (as well as outright occult theory stuff) where just vocally declaring what you want to be true can alter your perspective to an extent if it's repeated for long enough. It can also be used to make certain lies automatic like an alias or fake backstory (some old friends of mine used to do this shit, making up aliases and backstories for themselves and one another and just telling these lies to random strangers as small talk), or just used to make yourself believe a lie enough that you can tell it convincingly. I think method acting may work on a similar principle, where you just kind of trick your brain into giving you a different headspace and set of information to draw on.

      But it also has much darker uses when it comes to indoctrination, where if someone is made to repeat something enough it does start to sink in, whether that's religious or secular (like the ritual of pledging allegiance to the american flag that many millions of children are made to do every single day, although the abject misery of school probably detracts from the power of that particular ritual by associating it with being uncomfortable and miserable). It's not mind control by any means, and I don't want to give the impression that that's what I'm claiming, but it can ingrain itself over time if it's not challenged and corrected. I don't believe it's enough in and of itself to make someone coerced into performative rituals and declarations of belief start to believe them, since the coercion aspect implies an active resistance, but when paired with the other emotional effects of ritual it leaves people with a lot of sort of default lines with strong positive emotional attachment that their memory will bring up and so they will consider these to be beliefs just as a basic function of what they feel like when remembered.

        • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
          ·
          4 years ago

          i stopped standing for the pledge in high school and so did a lot of other kids. the older we got, the harder it was to force us to do it. i noticed it was mostly the white suburbanite kids still doing it in high school whereas most POC, and some of the “weird whites” (i.e LGBT whites, nerds, goths) would just lay their heads on the desk or text because it was too early for that shit. i went to a kinda liberal school though. i’m sure it was different at private schools charter schools and religious schools. also i was lucky to have kinda lefty teachers in the morning. i heard more conservative teachers mandated it and made a big deal out of it.

          Yeah, I remember it mostly not being taken seriously in high school, and I just ignored it apart from my last semester there, when there was the unfortunate combination of it happening during a class that I actually enjoyed and was interested in (and which I'd probably say was the single positive experience I had in high school) and the teacher making a big deal of it, so I stood to avoid antagonizing someone I otherwise liked and respected.

          one thing i thought was funny is that a lot of the kids in ROTC wouldn’t stand for the pledge. a lot of them were only in ROTC as a form of punishment for some form of “juvenile delinquency”.

          That's wild, the only thing I ever heard from ROTC kids in high school was that they wanted to be officers or get some enlistment privileges related to having taken ROTC.