To me the hate is quite simple to understand. Socialism means that the extremely rich will be worse off financially. The 1% have an unnatural love for money, and the idea of being less wealthy for the greater good is totally abhorrent to them.

For generations they've been able to demonise socialism using their disproportionate influence through the media, to the extent that the majority of the population now fear it.

We've really not moved on that far intellectually from the witch trials. People are collectively ignorant and fearful, and with the right nudges are easy to control to the point where they'll literally vote against their own good. They are the proverbial Turkeys voting for Christmas and I honestly don't know how we will ever get past it.

[–] bss03@infosec.pub 1 points 22 hours ago

We’ve really not moved on that far intellectually from the witch trials.

Cognitive biases seem to be unavoidable. Even if you are well-educated about a particular bias, it often takes reflection (internally or externally motivated) to recognize it in your decisions / behavior.

Fallacious reasoning is often just as good at convincing an audience, which is one of the reasons they are still in use despite many or most being documented and named in ancient times.

Individual training in critical thinking skills can help, but theocrats (in specific) and authoritarians (in general) spend a lot of effort making sure that public education is robbed of that. But, that's not enough to "intellectually move on"; even with that training, bias occurs. So, we have to build systems for bias detection and remediation if we want a just global society.

[–] NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Thankfully, we're now reaching a turning point where PragerU will be used to teach directly in schools, letting kids know why socialism is bad and capitalism is good. Wait, that's the opposite of what we want, fuck!