The NPC meme is beyond stale, but I'm gonna use it anyway. There are surprisingly few "player-characters" who are aware that "ideology" is a thing, and can actually understand the bounds of it. Most liberal people (Americans particularly) view themselves and "ideology-free" and are totally at the whims of it in a way they don't understand (as is obvious in this case).
ppl will tell you that the NPC meme is reactionary and that everyone has just as complex internal lives going on as you and reasons for their reactionary beliefs and and and.....
as someone who's done organizing (PARTICULARLY union organizing is enlightening on this,) i can tell you they absolutely do not. most ppl are following their state programming and (quite violently sometimes) shooting down anything that gives them cognitive dissonance about it. they have Emotions, mainly fear, and obviously peoples emotions are like Valid or whatever, but the idea that their thought processes are as comprehensive or they practice as much self-crit as a leftist is hilarious.
"Men and Women rarely admit their fear of freedom openly, however, tending to rather camouflage it -- sometimes unconsciously --by presenting themselves as defenders of freedom. They give their doubts and misgivings a profound air of sobriety, as benefiting custodians of freedom. But they confuse freedom with the maintenance of the status quo; so if [revolutionary cirricula] threatens to place that status quo in question, it thereby seems to constitute a threat to freedom itself."
most ppl are following their state programming and (quite violently sometimes) shooting down anything that gives them cognitive dissonance about it
This is why I think I get such strong reactions from people I know who don't care that much about politics and even less about foreign policy when topics like Xinjiang or the DPRK come up and I try and explain what's really going on there. The US government has pumped out enough propaganda about those topics that if you accept that you are not being told the truth, it just creates a cascade of cognitive dissonance. If the US government openly lies about this stuff (and it's the entirety of the bureaucracy + both political parties), then what that implies is scary for most Americans.
The propaganda is a necessary component, but honestly I think the main ingredient is just chauvinism. Every baby leftist who talks shit about the US loves to do the "but it's worse over there in China/North Korea/whatever" dance because deep down people don't want to believe that they live in the evil empire, especially with the implications about where their livelihoods and everything they enjoy come from.
The NPC meme is beyond stale, but I'm gonna use it anyway. There are surprisingly few "player-characters" who are aware that "ideology" is a thing, and can actually understand the bounds of it. Most liberal people (Americans particularly) view themselves and "ideology-free" and are totally at the whims of it in a way they don't understand (as is obvious in this case).
ppl will tell you that the NPC meme is reactionary and that everyone has just as complex internal lives going on as you and reasons for their reactionary beliefs and and and.....
as someone who's done organizing (PARTICULARLY union organizing is enlightening on this,) i can tell you they absolutely do not. most ppl are following their state programming and (quite violently sometimes) shooting down anything that gives them cognitive dissonance about it. they have Emotions, mainly fear, and obviously peoples emotions are like Valid or whatever, but the idea that their thought processes are as comprehensive or they practice as much self-crit as a leftist is hilarious.
This is why I think I get such strong reactions from people I know who don't care that much about politics and even less about foreign policy when topics like Xinjiang or the DPRK come up and I try and explain what's really going on there. The US government has pumped out enough propaganda about those topics that if you accept that you are not being told the truth, it just creates a cascade of cognitive dissonance. If the US government openly lies about this stuff (and it's the entirety of the bureaucracy + both political parties), then what that implies is scary for most Americans.
The propaganda is a necessary component, but honestly I think the main ingredient is just chauvinism. Every baby leftist who talks shit about the US loves to do the "but it's worse over there in China/North Korea/whatever" dance because deep down people don't want to believe that they live in the evil empire, especially with the implications about where their livelihoods and everything they enjoy come from.
yeah i mean read the book i quoted if u wanna see it talked abt morr articulately its a great read but yeah its a Real Thing for sure
Pedagogy of the Oppressed is one of the best books I've ever read.
Framing this as something that's inherent to how people behave rather than something that's programmed into them is very elitist.
i literally called it state programming don't read bad faith into other ppl's experience leftist challenge