Does anyone else hate pretty much everyone else in your job field? I'm back in school now but in the year I was working at a full time job, basically every other engineer was a chud who absolutely refused to consider other people and were only doing engineering because they got paid a lot. I know it's good to get to know everyone you work with and build solidarity but it's basically impossible when they're all so insufferable.
How do all of you deal with it?
I mean Sam Harris is a common stop on the road to leftist/socialist/communist thought for many uninformed listeners. I went through a year or two long phase of listening to him after losing my faith and centering around the material/analytical worldview. Spend enough time with that goal in mind and you start seeing the massive blinders Harris has on and that he is simply the highest form of intellectual that neoliberalism can produce.
In other words, if you meet Harris listeners, better chance than not that with a little calculated critique you can spin them over to our side. Many Harris listeners just don't understand the context through which Harris and his ideas fit within the world framework and in connection to US imperialism. Just gotta keep pointing it out, and he certainly has some 'yikes' moments that almost all his listeners still give him shit for. For some reason they keep coming back though, I guess until they dont.
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I mean it seems kinda defeatist to think we're never going to be able to change the minds of people over the age of 30. Sure, revolutions generally are a majority youth movement, but at some point if we're successful, we're gonna have to be able to change those minds, or at least allow material conditions to do so for us.
I don't think anyone is too far gone. Its a hell of a lot harder with the older generations, and there is a degree of neurologically based solidification as we age, but to think we are set in our world perspectives after a certain age seems symptomatic of "end of history" thinking. These older people are going to cling much harder to the worldview they've spent decades with, and its incredibly important as you present this oppositional worldview to them that you try to come from a place of forgiveness and understanding, that if they were to change they would be forgiven and welcomed with open arms.
They fear that the world is trying to leave them behind, that we are trying to bury them and their lives to build our own. That is NOT what we are fighting for. Not to say we shouldn't fiercely attack reactionary/liberal notions they attempt to continue to cling to as they concede to us on others. But our movement is one of class solidarity which if we are successful will bring an end to class distinction altogether. If we can't get anything more than half of the people over 40 on our side then we stand no chance. We're not there yet and that's what our job is right now, to get us to that point.
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I mean idk about you, but I haven't met a PMC that's actually happy. I guess it would depend on exactly who you include in that PMC, but my dad has spent the past couple decades in engineering management (and I have plenty of experience interacting with them) and the large majority of them know its all fucked but are too afraid of losing what they think they have that makes them happy (hint: those things don't make them happy). Listen to their grievances, and honestly a large majority of them can be directly answered from a socialist perspective.
My recommendation is to go heavy on commodity fetishism, alienation, cultural/social dysfunction both at home with the family and with communities more broadly, and US imperialist evil abroad. You'd be surprised how far you can get them to agree with you as long as you avoid the buzzwords. This while presenting yourself as a 'friend' will eventually give you the space to start bringing in the actual language and challenge them to either concede or pretty much take back everything theyve said. Either way, the seeds are already planted for them to see the benefits of what socialists/communists are talking about. That's at least half the battle.
For instance, I recently made a big breakthrough with my late 50's Trump voting parents on the basis of COVID policy and free annual preventative healthcare and screening as a right. I sent them the PSL 10 point program and the only thing they responded with was a total misrepresentation of what "free and on-demand" abortion meant (they thought it meant encouraging 8+ month of pregnancy abortions lol). If you've seen the PSL's program, then you know that the fact that that was their only gripe is huge.
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I mean have you talked to them since the beginning of the pandemic and through the many high profile police racial murders? I think you'd be surprised, the faith in the system broadly that many of them once held so strongly has eroded. Talk to them about this election. No one in real life that I've found is willing to defend Joe Biden past the standard "well what else can I do".
I see it a lot like religious faith. It can be strong for decades, and over time there certainly grow cracks in it, which we try to paint over and avoid going down disturbing rabbit holes within our minds. And then suddenly, sometimes clearly linked to a sudden change in personal/adjacent reality, other times simply the buildup of contradictions within the worldview that eventually teeters over the limit: the very base beliefs that hold together the worldview, its implications, and even the Self collapse. The pain of such collapse is truly indescribable; reality itself is put into question at every level. For those that go through this, try as they might, most will not be able to return to their previous selves and the ignorant comfort they never realized they lived with. The world they once knew had been changing all along, but they had not seen it until the degree of difference between the worldview and reality tipped over the unforeseen edge.
We don't need to bring these people to be professional revolutionaries. A large chunk of the population of any revolutionary situation will simply be along for the ride, at the very most giving vocal material support if they feel strongly one way or the other.
Many people will spend their whole lives living within themselves and their personal lives, not necessarily interested in world affairs past the cursory glance to satisfy cultural norm. And that's honestly ok. In the decades to come, these people will be won by movements based on their individual narrow interests. And we as socialists win on those interests in every case, the difficulty is in explaining that to them in a way that gets passed the cursory political/world understanding they operate at.
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Yeah this is what I was talking about, it's definitely learned political messaging. And whether it seems like it or not, if you position yourself in their lives in a way that they already see you as human and of empathetic/sound mind, your opposition to that learned political messaging will form cracks in their framework that in the moment they will diffuse and distract from. To the person confronting the "one day at a time" person, it seems like nothing said gets through. And if we're talking about the way it HAS BEEN for the past few decades I'd agree with you. But COVID has clearly been quite a fracturing force in the lives of those that are comfortable with the status quo and the slow march of history approach. There are huge contradictions in the capitalist system that have been papered over for decades, and this pandemic may have been the thing to send the complex system past its equilibrium point. How many more crises will it take for these people's reliance on the preservation of the worldview they've clung to past its expiration date to collapse? Depends on the person. But how do you think we all got here, on Chapo.chat? Our minds are shaped by the conditions and people around us. And while the US has maintained these conditions in a stasis for a critical portion of the population thus far, its capabilities to do so are clearly deteriorating at an ever increasing rate. There will come a day when it will be less painful to change worldviews than to continue pretending its possible to retain/go back.