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.
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 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 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
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.
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