Liberal ideology is the free square at the center of the bingo card. It's the world view almost all of us inherit from the various authority figures that we grow up around. Reflection, of any sort, can only take you away from it.

Starting from there, it takes years of difficult reflection before you can even contemplate the idea that universal housing, food security and education should be human rights, and that upsetting the status quo to achieve that is a worthwhile goal, and that subsequently using authority to defend those rights against fascists and bourgeois revanchists is morally justifiable.

I also understand that being ideologically liberal means living with extreme cognitive dissonance. They are raised to believe that racism is bad, and are given zero of the intellectual tools necessary to understand why majority-white-european states tend to be astronomically richer than the rest of the world, or why the situation is not improving, and therefore have nothing but racism and associated notions (corruption, evil china influence, etc) to explain it. Similarly they are raised to believe in merit, insisting that hard work and ingenuity are necessarily rewarded by capitalism, and yet have to live with endless examples of the exact contrary in every single sphere of life, up to and including a god damn cheeto beating the most credentialed game-player politician in history and becoming president of the United States of America. It goes on and on, and it cannot be good for the human brain.

When these people retreat into their mind palaces, plug their ears and yell CIA talking points at us, it's hard for me to get mad or think less of them. I just feel sad. I just wish we could trephinate Marxism into these people's head and skip past all of the hyper-conditioned defense mechanisms that USA regime propaganda has hammered into their heads.

That is all

  • PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    a year ago

    I kind of agree in that I know a lot of normal well-intentioned people who have had the message that capitalism is the only possible way to organize society hammered into them, even if they know it sucks, that they don't have any hope for a better world. They just hope to keep themselves and their families from slipping off the slippery rungs of the ladder into poverty and despair.

    Those people aren't arguing with us on Lemmy, however. All the NATO-loving debatebros on here can face the wall as far as I'm concerned