Propaganda doesn't totally rob people of agency free will (more accurate term), if it did this site wouldn't exist. People do have the capacity to develop critical thinking, skepticism, and a basic curiosity about the world that allow them to develop some resistance to propaganda.
You can hold people accountable for failing to even attempt to do this.
I think it would be unwise for this site to start believing that they're all special little geniuses who actually are immune to propaganda because they're just so correct about everything all the time.
I agree no one is immune to propaganda. That's literally part of this post I made.
But does that mean I have to think someone who literally thinks forest fires are started by Jewish Space Lasers is equally a intelligent and critical as me?
Considering that the content of this post is tacitly holding ourselves up to be superior to other people, I think it's important to remind that no, actually, we are not so special. Let alone that any of us might have ended up believing very different things, we are all still vulnerable to being misled. Stay humble out there, Hexbear.
Considering that the content of this post is tacitly holding ourselves up to be superior to other people
You edited your comment so to reply to this part. Are you actually consistent in your life in NOT holding yourself as superior to other people who hold hogwash beliefs? Like if you've ever encountered an antivaxxer or a QAnon supporter, did you view and treat them with the same respect as you would a fellow socialist? Or did you at least hold them in some contempt for their maliciously ignorant beliefs?
you can think they're a dumb stupid idiot and think they got to being there due to circumstances out of their control at the same time. you're trying to put this all in a neat box when it's actually pretty messy
they got to being there due to circumstances out of their control at the same time.
Okay so nobody can be morally condemned for anything then cuz hard determinism? Got it. Let's ban the_dunk_tank and if anyone posts about how bad any political figure is they should be banned cuz no one is really bad all people are just victims of fate.
Im sorry you think youre just built more different than everyone and thats why youre so great and good and leftist
Its either you accept materialism or you dont
You cant pick and choose this stuff because youre basically saying poor people should of just not done crimes or be poor if they have so much agency and are not in fact heavily shaped by their environment and community
If thats true, how do you punish someone who acts out reactionary ideas? It obviously still has to happen. I think its all messy and cant be distilled into "bad people are bad" Some element of justice needs to be restorative which I think is a better outlook on life than straddling the kinda fashy "im better than everyone because im leftist"
You know what maybe you're right, but I will say I think people should be more consistent if this is the position we're gonna take. If I see you, or anyone else who gave me shit in this thread, use a term like "burgerbrain" anywhere else on here I'm calling it out.
It's not deflection, my post is literally saying we aren't immune to propaganda.
But, also that, not being 100% doesn't really give a free pass for people to repeatedly regurgitate easily debunk-able bullshit multiple times. I don't give Vaush or Destiny or Jordan Peterson fans a pass just because some hypothetical version of myself maybe would have fallen for those hucksters too. If we follow this logic to it's maxim I think you just end up at hard determinism. We can't really judge anyone for anything, that Neo-Nazi only ended up that way cuz his mom made him oatmeal instead of eggs one breakfast and that set off a chain of events that inevitably lead to him reading too much Stonetoss.
what will our narwhal do and what time will it do it?
This site isn't populated by people that came to have perfect politics through their own unique virtue or intelligence. This site is made up of people that came to have varying degrees of counter-hegemonic politics because of the material and social conditions in their lives that alienated them from the dominant ideology of their society. Hexbear has no billionaires because billionaires wouldn't choose to be on Hexbear, not because Hexbears choose to not be billionaires.
Nobody here is better than anyone else, and none of you used superior innate individual will, virtue, intelligence, or wisdom to develop the correct ideas that everyone else chooses not to develop because they're too lazy, corrupt, ignorant, or stupid . This is just ordinary liberal exceptionalism.
And so we once again arrive at phrenology with online-leftist characteristics
Takes minute differences I guess. I got radicalized through cycling, which is an innocent enough thing to pick up on it's own. But I eventually noticed that hey, every institution and law that's supposed to make this not deadly is smoke and mirrors and often actively works to fuck you, maybe these other people complaining about such issues have a point
Nobody here is better than anyone else
I mean if you're a Marxist then I'd expect you to think other Marxists have a better understanding of politics and propaganda than the average layperson, liberal judgements about virtue aside.
There's a plethora of false consciousnesses and libidinal traps people can find themselves in, cultural hegemony is a powerful superstructural reinforcement of base dynamics.
I know too many people who embrace ignorant escapism rather than examine the system they find themselves in, so aggressively complacent in their incuriosity that they never develop any sort of coherent epistemological method. They're the people who find themselves caught up in hedonistic nihilism or fascist co-optations.
I'm confident in my opinion that the average Marxist is "better" than the average Joe Rogan listener. Someone who's read 10,000 books has undoubtedly expressed and developed a degree of wisdom/knowledge/virtue that people who've read two Wikipedia pages don't possess. Innate or otherwise is immaterial as far as I'm concerned, the result is a different way of engaging with information and the world, a better ability to identify propaganda (a developed "immunity" to it).
“Better” is not the same thing as “more competent in some respect”. “Better” implies inherent worth, that someone for some reason, possibly even a literal physical disability, who cannot access the same level of knowledge as us but still desires to and is a leftist, would not be worth as much as people as people who are able to access more knowledge are.
That's just semantics, in which case the word better can signify either concept and anything in between.
No it’s not semantics, it’s what the person you responded to meant.
That's fair, my prior response didn't fully take into account the context of the discussion, sorry
But I disagree, because the top comment (my interpretation of it at least) seems to be making the common vulgar determinist reduction of all choices and actions to simple results of material circumstances. I don't think this is a particularly useful or accurate reduction, especially in the context of this post.
If the comment is more pushing back on a general trend of liberal exceptionalism I don't have as much of a problem. But the post itself isn't an example of this exceptionalism, nor are value judgements as to a given person's ability to critically engage with things.
if you’re a Marxist then I’d expect you to think other Marxists have a better understanding of politics and propaganda than the average layperson
I believe people who study Marxism-Leninism seriously tend to have a more accurate understanding of politics and propaganda than the average liberal because history has demonstrated Marxism-Leninism's explanatory power in describing the relationship between past conditions and current conditions to accurately predict future conditions. That's very different than the OP's suggestion that humans have an innate hierarchy of value that expresses itself in the form of better people espousing better ideas, which is the same self-justifying vanity that led colonial powers throughout history to make the same claim to justify stealing land from "barbarous" natives who demonstrated their inferiority through their "failure to develop civilization".
I really don't think that's the concept the OP is invoking-- consider the choice of the word develop rather than something like innately possess
I don't disagree with your criticism of the concept itself, that sort of exceptionalism as well as the view of oneself as a static, immutable essence (or defined by static, immutable characteristics) are both dangerous
actually, i am just more built different and more inherently smarter and have more iq points than everyone and thats why i have all the correct leftist views
banger article glad to see someone linked it before i got here.
Everyone loves saying "built different" as some oh so fucking brilliant retort.
I don't think anyone is "built" anything, but people do often end up as impasses where they go one way or another, and one way is bad and the other is good. Some people choose to go one way and ended up here, others went the other and ended up in
Again this all just loops around back to hard determinism where we really can't judge anyone for anything. Hitler was just a smol bean what had doomed by fate.
It's a meme meant as a retort. Anytime someone says you can judge someone for something they "meme" "oh so you're built different?"
Yeah I was born superior, which is why I didn't lite that cat on fire like the other kid from my middle school did. Clearly thinking bad people are bad makes me a fucking Nazi.
Honestly I don't know wtf people in this thread want me to conclude here.
Like if we follow the logic some people are presenting, Israelis who put out lawn chairs to watch children in Gaza be bombed to death are no more morally wrong than someone who marches against genocide, nobody is better than anybody, we are all just victims of our upbringings.
Thing is if this is your view I can fucking respect that. But nobody on this fucking site actually behaves like that, any time anyone posts about, for example, Israelis putting out lawn chairs to have a laugh at genocide, we talk about what awful psychos they are. I show up and say "yup they are awful psychos and we can condemn them as such, we are better than them" oh NO NO NO NO! I could have been just as bad as them, we all are the same you see.
I don't fucking get it.
I show up and say “yup they are awful psychos and we can condemn them as such, we are better than them” oh NO NO NO NO! I could have been just as bad as them, we all are the same you see.
"those people are awful psychos and we're better than them" is reductive and ineffective at explaining both why they're doing what they're doing, and why it's bad. It's also, crucially, the exact language they would use to explain why it's right and good for them to exterminate the population of Gaza. Posting about how much better you are doesn't improve material conditions for anyone in Gaza, but it might make you feel better about (forgive me for making statistically likely demographic assumptions) living in a white supremacist settler colony benefiting from generations of human slavery and the genocide of an indigenous population.
If you believe a person is bad because they do bad things, then the person can change with the action. A person can stop doing bad things, and thus stop being a bad person. If you believe a person does bad things because they're bad, then the only solution is to kill them.
I believe that the genocide in Gaza is bad, and the solution is to stop the killings and allow the people of Palestine to return to their homes. I don't believe the solution is to exterminate the "bad people" until only the "good people" are left alive, which is basically how the Zionist occupation government would describe its official policy toward Palestine at this point.
Like if we follow the logic some people are presenting, Israelis who put out lawn chairs to watch children in Gaza be bombed to death are no more morally wrong than someone who marches against genocide, nobody is better than anybody, we are all just victims of our upbringings.
I do actually believe this, more or less.
It doesn't mean that I never oppose people or find them loathsome and vile. I have desires for the world that are in opposition to a lot of other people's desires; many of my desires require certain people to stop behaving in a certain way, sometimes en masse. If I want to work to bring about the world that I desire, I should do what is necessary to effect it. This is, at the practical level, the whole of my morality. Where it comes from and the exact nature of my ethics is another matter, but does include a belief that people are not intrinsically arranged on a Manichean axis of good and evil. I understand hatred, contempt, etc. as second-order positions. For me, I don't find them particularly useful. What I am concerned with is a primary goal, essentially, general human welfare. I believe that communism is the best, perhaps only, mechanism (politically speaking, to achieve this and therefor view it as a tool toward that end. I really don't care what people deserve and who is virtuous or wicked; to me, all people deserve to be safe and happy. Often people inhibit other people to be safe and happy and these inhibitions should be removed, by whichever means are most expedient while remaining conducive to long term goals. This is, of course, not simple in its practice, but it is the guiding principle from which my positions follow.
Again this all just loops around back to hard determinism where we really can’t judge anyone for anything. Hitler was just a smol bean what had doomed by fate.
It's fine if you're working through your understanding of philosophical determinism, but shaping your understanding of the world around "I want to judge other people, what helps me most easily facilitate that?" isn't a very stable base on which to build egalitarian politics. Ask yourself what you're trying to accomplish by judging people. Is it making yourself feel better, or is it making other people better? If it's the latter, have you found it to be effective in your own life? Have you found your life to be improved primarily through being shamed and judged by people "better" than you? Have you found others receptive to your shame and judgement, and grateful to you for improving their lives in that way?
If you're trying to change someone's mind, it's difficult to be successful if you don't understand how and why they came to believe what they believe. If your answer is just "they believe stupid things because they're stupid", then you have a built in excuse for not trying to change their mind. You can't do it because it's impossible. You're smart, they're dumb, and that's just the unchanging natural order of the world.
That's a belief system that's effective at making you feel better about the status quo, but not very effective at changing it.
I think this is related to the concept of "different levels of wrongness." someone who says "2+2=4" is correct. Someone who says 2+2=5 is incorrect. But if someone else says 2+2=35, they're far more wrong than the person who says 5. Someone who says "2+2= Cat" is so wrong they are no longer talking about mathematics anymore. But then there's an answer like "2+2 = 22" which is also very wrong, but could indicate that the person doesn't understand the concept in question at all(in this case, addition) but is still trying to give a sincere and honest answer.
When talking to people who believe nonsense, we need to figure out how much nonsense, and how different from our own interpretation their understanding is. We shouldn't assume we have things right, the goal should always be to get "less wrong" and to help others be "less wrong."
I can't hear the term "lesswrong" without thinking of those AI cultist freaks.
Ew, they use a term like that? Makes sense. Any type of internet "-bro" will take actually useful terms and turn them into meaningless junk designed to shut down conversation.
you have material life dice rolls to start even asking questions
Just as mass propaganda of "everything is going great" hits a wall in the bottom part of society, "the everything is shit" hits similar wall in the owning part of society.
To repeat something I said elsewhere in this thread, isn't the end logic of this just hard determinism? Can we not judge anyone for anything really cuz we're all just prisoners of our fate?
Also I do have to ask, is everyone really consistent with this whole not feeling superior to people with dumb beliefs? Cuz I don't it based on the content of this site. I'm pretty sure y'all feel superior to any anti-vaxxers you've met in your journeys, as you should because it's a fucking horribly uninformed position with tons of publicly available, easily consumable info debunking it.
You don't need to emotionally judge someone who is malicious to want to stop them from doing harm. I don't see how us being against nazis is incompatible with thinking that we could have ended like them in their shoes
I don't see how us being against nazis is incompatible with thinking that we could have ended like them in their shoes
I think there are certain "turning points" in a person's life where they either go down a dark road or they don't. I definitely had a point in my 20s where the far right seemed tempting but I didn't go there, it's the easy option, actually learning about the world is harder. I reserve my right to judge people who did.
Its soft determinism of likelihoods. Historical materialism speaks of classes, millions of people thinking this or that, but that just means 80 percent of them might think something in particular, due to life dice rolls being this or that in certain composition of class relations.
I try not to, i'm a dumbass in lots sorts of things. Anti-vaxxer who masks or lives in rural parts is completely different from anti-vaxxer in restaurant business/healthcare. One is cautious, the other is malicious person, intellect doesn't enter it
I try not to, i'm a dumbass in lots sorts of things. Anti-vaxxer who masks or lives in rural parts is completely different from anti-vaxxer in restaurant business/healthcare. One is cautious, the other is malicious person, intellect doesn't enter it
I agree there's mitigating factors, I for example don't really judge people from the developing world as harshly for being behind on certain social issues. I take those into consideration.
And if you really do try I applaud your for you consistency, but I'm suspicious when people on this site make this claim, I mean we literally have a comm called "The Dunk Tank" where we mock people for their stupid beliefs. When someone takes that mockery and tries to apply it more seriously then suddenly we're soft determinists who aren't superior to people who believe in the Great Replacement Theory.
Because people believing in great replacement theory take existing issues (falling birth rates due to worker hours/absence of socialized childcare, immigration workers hiring to dodge worker rights) and arrive at weird conclusions. Propagandists are obviously unreachable as they are paid to lower wages of immigrants, but people who believe in that stuff? they see issues, they can be reached. this is all of course in personal conversations, without peer pressures, and not a duty of marginalised comrades.
Re: larger points there are two sets (well lots more than two, but two groups) of heuristics of looking at the world: the elite one and the marginal one. The elite one is squabbling about who should be in the elites and the marginal is elites shouldn't exist (communism/anarchism).
The elite one is acceptable to the masses of workers as long as they deliver on something of livable standard (like why communists collapsed in usa after ww2), and following squabbling of slowly removing barriers on entry to elites to woman/blacks/lgbtq.
But fundamentally that system of deliviring living standards is unstable due to larger arch of history of capitalists profit drive, and we now entering the zone where they have consistently not delivering for larger and larger slices of population who start asking questions. Those questions lead them to all sorts of answers , some think its cause christianity, some cause one of the groups entered the elites, some cause outsourcing to china; some think cause thats what the capitalist system does
And larger point about of "they arrive at weird conclusions": oligarchs create information noise of "pick your own pet theory, any theory" except communist one. If all you ever heard of communism is usa history books, would you look at what those weird communist are saying in videos with low production values and 10 k views, instead of brightly lit studios with conventionally attractive hosts?
And even here if you decide to look at it, how likely are you to drop into some sorts of sectarian infighting with finger pointing
"the everything is shit" hits similar wall in the owning part of society.
We live in the information age. There's no excuse for this. Mfers need to google things.
And that right there is privilege gone unrecognised. Not as much of a privilege as some others, it's still the sum of something. You didn't will yourself into questioning your position in life, nor were you struck by lightning to do ao.
I mean if you earn 200 k a year, how likely are you to even start asking questions? why would you start asking them, isntead of thinking others are lazy bums.
And that's also ignoring following filter: is my salary (for example cocoa beans importer) built on child labor in ghana? You lose 95 % percent dice roll on first entry, another 80 percent on second one. Lots easier to internalise of "them being over there and i receive my salary over here" than to follow through
Maybe I'm just different from most people, but my family was fairly well off and as a teenager I still was curious how everyone else was doing. How do we "stack up"? That seems like a fairly common thing.
I'm a white guy, but I still understand systemic racism is an issue 🤷 not really an excuse not to. People choose to ignore it. Poor people understand things are better for rich fucks, and they refuse to understand things are bad for poor people. The wall you face when propagandizing poor people is the facts, with rich people it's their own willful ignorance.
i grew up poor and i didn't realize people were richer than me because i never interacted with them. i just accepted life was bad and it was for everyone.
only until i got to college i understood that i had been seriously fucked for my entire childhood and how much better your life is made just by having money.
what if you're not curious enough to ask those kind of questions? what if you just accept that life is garbage? because that's a reasonable viewpoint to have, it's valid.
The idea of personal responsibility to do and be everything right is inherently right-wing, people are products of their conditions. We are no more intelligent than normal people, we just got the info and chances to think differently
Agency is not the same as Free Will. Agency merely means the "choice" happens internal to a being. A child has the agency to "choose" between a healthy snack and a cookie, but their behavior will largely be dependent on what they have been (actively OR passively) trained to do.
You can get angry at that child all you want for not making the "choice" you want, or not putting in the effort you expect. It's not gonna do a whole lotta good without substantive action.
You were correct I should I have free will not agency. I'm referring to adults here not children
If I put you, an adult, in a situation for which you lack the training, should I then get angry at you for failing?
No, but this doesn't really map properly into the real world. People don't just receive discrete, neutral information which they either do or don't have the training to verify. The circumstances that lead to the development of ideology (bourgeois or proleratian) vary wildly and some people get radicalized into good comrades by mostly the same conditions that turn others into Klansmen. We do have a right to get a little bit angry at people who fall for propaganda.
Again, I very much recommend reading up on Classical Conditioning.
me, a beast: waking up
my scientist: let's put that beast in a situation
me: yes honey
IRL what doing you mean by "training" here?
I mean yeah if you asked me to operate a forklift without any instruction it's not my fault if I spear a pallet of mayo with one of the prongs.
Life isn't operating a forklift though. Being able to function in the real world comes with a lot of basic training. Depends on your material conditions a bit, but most people get taught basic reasoning, emotional regulation, morality and basic math and literacy by a combination of parents, community and school in their childhood. When they enter adulthood they're expected to expand on that base knowledge on their own, and we often judge them if they pursue garbage sources and come to garbage conclusions in doing so. Often people with near identical childhoods end up getting pulled in totally opposite directions in adulthood, two boys from the same village may end up with one joining the Bolsheviks and the other joining the Whites, I think we can hold them responsible for their choices.
IRL what doing you mean by "training" here?
will largely be dependent on what they have been (actively OR passively) trained to do
You are being trained 24/7 by forces often completely out of your purview. Every interaction is molding your behavior behind the scenes; From things as subtle as a half smile by a total stranger to something as blatant as a billboard telling you you're not a real [insert gender here] unless you use X Product. We call it Classical Conditioning and I very much recommend reading up on it quite a bit before declaring blanket statements about human behavior.
When they enter adulthood they're expected to expand on that base knowledge on their own, and we often judge them if they pursue garbage sources and come to garbage conclusions in doing so.
All those judgements are still subjective, and the people you are judging are often judging right back. Let's be real, if you would like to get all judgmental perhaps you should be asking yourself why we're wasting time on a shitposting website while the world burns instead of doing actual work towards revolutionary action. This site is very much not an endpoint for leftism, it's a speedbump. There are like a relative handful of people on this site doing revolutionary work while the rest of us cosplay as leftists, accomplishing just as little as any other lib.
All those judgements are still subjective, and the people you are judging are often judging right back. Let's be real, if you would like to get all judgmental perhaps you should be asking yourself why we're wasting time on a shitposting website while the world burns instead of doing actual work towards revolutionary action. This site is very much not an endpoint for leftism, it's a speedbump. There are like a relative handful of people on this site doing revolutionary work while the rest of us cosplay as leftists, accomplishing just as little as any other lib.
Well if nothing else that's a good point
critical thinking education is pretty abysmal in the US, as is literacy, so your highschool education on literary analysis is gonna be basic or nonexistent.
Another point I've made on this site: I think we over emphasis the effects of public education. Yeah sure US schools teach a rosey view of US history and don't really teach kids proper critical thinking skills. That's the case in MOST countries with a public education system. And as crap as it is US schools do at least give you access to resources that you can use to further educate yourself.
I don't think we can really argue the average American child is more indoctrinated that a Russian peasant who parents were illiterate, where the only provider of education was the Orthodox Church and who were told from birth that the Czar was ordained by God. People in places with far FAR worse educational standards than the US have managed a clearer view of the world.
Sorry, in my day-to-day Australian life, I repeatedly run into Soviet propaganda from 90 years ago and eventually fell for it. :(
Yes, I find the same goes for ads for example and addiction to social media etc. I'm not denying both are a problem in society but I don't like the assumption that everyone is equally affected by it or when people use it as a ready-made rationalisation for something im doing.
I also think your point can also be extended to say that generally right-wingers are also way more susceptible to it, even if to some extent we all are.
Us, we, the politically minded internet dwellers and the pmc/lanyard/neoliberal/boomer/chud/right wing psycho internet people are both hyper-aware of media. We're also hyper-aware of one another. We all tend to over-emphasize the importance of media (and therefore propaganda) in politics. That goes for traditional media like TV and new media like social media and podcasts.
Media has inserted itself as main method to know what's going on in the world for many people. That doesn't mean it's actually the only way or that it's the source of political action in the world.
Misinformation, data, propaganda, information, news, etc aren't as important to the way things are as it seems. It's not a battle between who gets to tell the story, it's the winners of the battle that get to tell the story and the winners are those who own the labor. There is demonstrable proof that illiterate, largely unread people can start and win a revolution. The question is whether that's true for the revolution to come. It'll be hard to say until it's over.
The problem with change more broadly is that in order for someone to change, they have to WANT to change. I think a lot of people don't want to change. Change is scary. Change is hard. Change can end up being worse for the individual overall, it carries some risk. Many of us live in a society that largely pushes the idea that change and growth is bad, which is honestly the most insidious propaganda of them all. Folks have to take that first giant leap first and be willing to and open to change. Or they have to be forced into change via an upsetting of their material conditions.
it's not enough to want to change, you need to be able to as well. for one example, someone with severe adhd and no access to (effective) therapy or medication isn't going to change shit, not matter how much they want to.
kill the protestant in your head.
I can either understand why people in my life believe that Putin is Hitler 2.0 and it's our moral imperative to kill all Russians, and work against that narrative, or I can denounce them for having common brainworms that I (and most of this site) held until a few years ago.
Or are you talking about weirdos online?If someone tried to show me propaganda, I would simply say, "No thanks."
People on this site literally do exactly this every day. Do you believe people in the DPRK get out and push trains?
i assume the majority of people who 'dont fall for the propaganda' had really easy lives. and it's funny how right wing is the viewpoint that you're better than someone for being left wing.
