I work in tech. I like the work itself and my coworkers are all nice and polite people. But their views on politics, economics and the world in general is complete dogshit.
Elon Musk? The world's biggest brain genius. Demanding fees for healthcare? Very reasonable and necessary. Inheritance tax? An unspeakable injustice. Jordan Peterson? An insightful intellectual. Learning a second foreign language in school? Waste of time when you could have programming classes instead. Learning ancient history in high school? Stupid and useless when you already know you want to work in tech. STEM? The pinnacle of prestigious human knowledge. Humanities? A ridiculous and useless waste of time. Trades? Probably okay if you're too stupid to do something better. Unions? Outdated and useless. Arts? Does not compute.
All they seem to care about is learning how to code, getting a job or starting a business and succeeding at that by being a lone Randian superman. They have no sense of broader solidarity or for the existence of something of value beyond the hamster wheel of the grindset.
I think these people are a product of an educational system that is set up to produce good employees rather than good citizens. University level education will include a few token classes on broader subjects like history or philosophy but staff and students treats them like something to get over with so you can do the important stuff rather than something of importance. And you can hardly blame them, the dog eat dog world of capitalism doesn't reward an engineer for writing sonnets or knowing labour history and consequently students focus their attention on learning stuff that will make them less likely to end up on the bottom of the hierarchy.
In essence generations has been raised to be very skilled in a few practical technical fields while being completely illiterate about everything else.
How do you deal with these people in daily life? With their idiotic reactionary beliefs and their stubborn refusal to acknowledge any form of culture beyond the handful of IP rights white western cishet males are expected to enjoy?
And how do we prevent STEM lord bullshit under socialism?
I like to think that I did a good job raising my little brother. He is an engineer and I fed him philosophy and politics and he's a well rounded man.
And he totally loathes stemlords. He is a smart dude (sorry, big bro gotta brag on his behalf, I love him) and he could definitely tell in engineering school that there are the true analytical thinkers and the ones that do rote memorization. It was eye opening and I think compelled him to not be one of them. He's got a very critical eye. When I first explained materialist politics he was like "yeah makes perfect sense"
I consider him left adjacent. He isn't a communist but he is anti capitalist. I will continue my radicalization of him this Christmas.
Literally how my wife de-STEMlorded me and I became a communist, you're a great person, thank you.
I had the exact same journey of hating the surrounding stem lords, understanding how fucking terrible for our society (and it's people) rote "education" is, how materialist arguments etc work and then their application to politics and history, and things clicking into place as you watch everything around you "identify" problems but never fix them, realize under a materialist lens that's a design feature not a flaw of our existing system, etc.
I will forever love her for that alone, among many other things. The appreciation of arts, history, politics, culture, everything I had "rejected" for STEM, the appreciation for all those things that I've gained since and how much richer of a person I feel for it have been simultaneously the greatest and most frustrating journey of my life, simply because of how much of it I wasted believing "that's the way the world works" means shit when you don't follow it with "so how do we make it better".
:wholesome: