The amount of times I've been talking to some friends and I'll make a prediction or make an observation on what's going to happen in a political situation (or what to focus on), get disagreed with and called a tankie or pessimist or whatever, and then I'm correct 3 months later is driving me mad. Of course, they then start saying they need to protest against that or whatever. You would think at some point if someone is consistantly correct about stuff (that isn't hard to be correct on, I'm just like, the only theory reader and person who knows any real history in a group of americans) that you'd start to give them a little credit and maybe value their opinion a little higher, maybe even try to understand what's different between you and them????
Example: telling them ukraine has a nazi problem???? Why was this difficult.
It might just be me or something (likely) but it seems like it's a trend across the states.
it's a national scale problem. all the people on the wrong side of the Iraq war still have media and political careers; all the people who were right were considered unserious and have disappeared. it is more important to "project seriousness" and be part of the club than to be right.
editing to add: hardly anybody actually thinks about anything or tries to analyze current conditions on the basis of past events or ongoing trends. it's all just vibes, and materialist analysis has bummer vibes.
Welcome to the vast rank of Cassandras of this community. There are many of us, and none of us are listened to.
greek mythology character who could see the future and nobody would listen to her warnings
It's not about whether you're right or wrong it's whether you:
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align with what they consider to be an authority figure
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are saying things that they already agree with
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are believed by other people
Sadly, if you don't tick off enough of these boxes for someone, all you are to them is somebody who got lucky.
This is exactly right, it's so frustrating. It's so hard to get my Mom to come around to anything because she essentially just has sources of information that she decides to "trust" for reasons I still don't understand. Anything that goes against them is something she struggles to accept. Even if I do get her to come around it's treated like an edge case.
I feel like I can get most people to come around on a particular issue, or even socialism generally but I can't get them to actually change the media they consume. I remember a talk I had with mom and dad where I convinced them, boomer and silent generation, of socialism and even got them to say socialism is good. But then the next day they go back to reading the neoliberal newspaper and watching msnbc. So essentially I have to convince them of something every time it comes up because even if what I'm saying is right they'll forget in a month and go back to believing what the TV told them.
65% of democrats during the 2020 primaries thought that Biden supported M4A despite him fucking saying he didn't! They just assume that the dems are the good guys that support the good policies and if they didn't make it happen it means it was never meant to happen. How can you have a democracy when people act like this??
How can people care more about who is saying it than what they are actually saying or referencing, people lie all the time!
You ever hear the story about the time Target figured out a woman was pregnant before her family did?
The reason they did that is because people are creatures of habit and through data mining they've determined that there are certain times in people's lives that they are more open to big changes. Kind of a marketing cheat code they figured out.
Now think of how hard it can be for people to convince themselves to start working out, eating right, not procrastinating. :side-eye-1: :side-eye-2: And you and I expect them to completely change their worldview and the institutions they trust after a couple of conversations when everything else in the world is telling them otherwise. It sucks, but it also kinda makes sense when you think about the big picture like that.
I'm too autistic for this shit but thank you for spelling it out for me.
I feel for you, I really do.
You would think at some point if someone is consistantly correct about stuff (that isn’t hard to be correct on, I’m just like, the only theory reader and person who knows any real history in a group of americans) that you’d start to give them a little credit and maybe value their opinion a little higher, maybe even try to understand what’s different between you and them???
Even understanding this crap :this: is something i say to myself often .The problem is that it's more about salesperson-ship than truth. Our belief is based more on habits, values, and emotional attachments than logic. Honestly, if you wanna understand more of how it works, marketing based psychology books are the way to go. Marketers are nothing more than propagandists, after all.
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There's no one who's least likely to admit they're wrong than an ideologically committed liberal. Even fascists are more likely to admit they're wrong (in the direction of being ever more deranged and genocidal, of course) than a liberal.
People have a hard time admitting they're wrong, in general. So there is that. However, when what they've digested and internalized from outside sources is wrong it can shake foundational cores they may not want to accept. It's easier to wave off someone being more realistic about the world's affairs than to internally recognize, everything I know and everything I'm fed is a lie.
In my experience americans uniquely have a massive negative reaction if you disagree with them, to the point of literally leaving friend groups because they can't stand me that much for not completely hating China.
Europeans on the other hand I never have this experience with. I can disagree with people in the UK or the rest of Europe and while we might talk about it there's a certain amount of "this person's opinion doesn't actually affect me so w/e" that goes into it. It's ok to disagree because everyone knows none of our opinions fucking matter.
Americans on the other hand seem to think their opinions actually matter and that they have to throw away people for ""wrong"" opinions as those opinions are creating bad things that happen apparently.
Just an observation, Americans seem to massively overreact to any disagreement whereas everyone else does not.
As an American (ugh) I can say I’ve threatened to end friendships over opinions, though those have been opinions held by a friend who was big into JBP and railing against postmodern neo-Marxism for a bit. Some friends and I basically convinced him to stop through this “threat” and he’s been a much better person in the years since.
Don’t suppose I know where to draw the line but I don’t feel like I can be friends with people who hold some opinions that ostensibly don’t affect me directly but are still reprehensible imo
Bigotry sits in a separate category I think.
The issue however is americans will do this over geopolitics. If you don't get in-line behind their imperialism and their view of who the enemies of the world are then you are a bad 'un and you get de-friended.
Europeans don't do this in my experience. Take for example the Nordstream shit, I had multiple americans throw shitfits at me for suggesting it was america and not russia that did it. I've had disagreements with europeans however and they're fine with disagreement over it, no worries. Our opinions have literally no impact on geopolitics and everyone in Europe seems to intuitively understand this and that there's zero point in hating one another for geopolitical disagreement, but Americans seem to think all opinions matter including geopolitical ones.
This behaviour might have started with the Iraq war come to think of it.
That’s a fair distinction. Could be compounded by the fact that in America the most widespread political opinions, either “liberal” or “conservative”, are built on a foundation of bigotry (racial, ethnic, national, etc).
The political landscape resulting from this both encourages the most small minded and inflexible worldviews that can’t deal with opposing views, but also a huge proportion of people who hold reprehensible bigoted views that should be intolerable to anyone with principles. I can deal with the occasional rare liberal who means well but doesn’t really examine their own beliefs, but there are so many die hards with calcified views inextricable from the chauvinism that just permeates everything in this hellcountry
Is it perhaps the tribal nature of US politics combined with the bigotry then?
IE, if you don't support x position then you must be part of that group of people who are bigots, therefore you're a bad person, therefore I should react extremely negatively to your disagreement with me.
I'm not suggesting that they're going through this thought process consciously, but that the emotional sentiment and training that they've undergone provokes it as a natural reaction.
it's really reassuring to hear someone outside has the same observation
i think it's partly a culture descended from 'pilgrims' who went to go do religion the right way, and partly that we have no goddamn control in our lives so we fixate on having The Correct Opinions cus it's the one thing we have full agency over.
edit: this is compounded by the fact that we all basically live the same. Same grocery stores, same pumps, same brands, same Hollywood sense of right and wrong. So when someone -- a person who on the face of it is a good person who treats others right and behaves largely the same way you do -- disagrees about something, there's all the cognitive dissonance that comes with it.
The real question is what to do about this issue? It is a principle barrier to dispelling brainworms because it requires fragile-gloves for anything lest you end up in the baddies bin to that person along with any potential gossiping they will go on to do.
I'm sure it's why it's so difficult to bring people back from supporting foreign wars once the news has told them they should, or why the "tankie" thought-terminating propaganda has been so annoying. Once you're put in the "this person's a baddie" box they shut down to all influence.
Because of cognitive dissonance
Because they don't want to confront the possibility that they might be the bad guy and that their entire view of the world is completely wrong
Here's a short essay I like that does class analysis on your exact question
https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
The vast majority of people can not handle people that see through the bs be and call it like how it is.
It's too real for them. Many people are afraid of being negative cuz it's toxic to the point that they are hopelessly positive to the point of toxicity.
Why they don't listen? Cuz they just don't want to see that some one with your outlook is right. I deal with it all the time. It's pretty isolating at times but what ever. You'll eventually get people that understand you and want to talk to you.
It's wild cause I'm one of the biggest optimists out of all of the people I know. I'm just not going to delude myself into thinking this shit is better than it is. Do I believe that through hard work and time things can improve? Yes! Do I think that's going to happen in x situation? No that's stupid.
Many people are afraid of being negative
i wonder if they have some sense of how things actually are and are instinctively keeping their heads in the sand.
I think something that goes under discussed in these types of conversations is that you will never be able to convince somebody of something their material conditions do not already tell them is correct. So we can probably theorize why people in the united states may more proportionally never really come in to contact w the material reality that makes them wrong, but simultaneously there's not a lot a lot that can be done about that without a part of their material conditions or understanding of those conditions changing.
