askchapo

Since I don't like dehumanizing people or ascribing morality to them unnecessarily, I've ended up drawn to thinking of liberalism as a sort of political hypoxia. I'm specifically thinking of this old video of this fellow named Michael experiencing hypoxia for an experiment: he cannot say what eight minus three equals, nor can he fit shapes into a toddler's shape sorter toy, nor does he stop playing with the toy when firmly and repeatedly told by a supervisor that he will die if he does not immediately put his mask back on. Michael was in that moment "drunk, euphoric and overconfident": he sincerely believed he was a math genius, and he was wholly unaware of his impending death within ten seconds, had the mask not been forced back on him in time.

So, somehow, we are all in a low-oxygen environment, but only a few of us have managed to secure masks...

This is one of the most helpful essays I've ever read: https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

I guess to respond to your prompt more directly, it's definitely in the direction of "horrendous people" rather than "drones," not because of some inborn lack of character but because they have been raised in an environment that encourages them at every turn to be awful chauvinists and misanthropes. "When education is not liberatory, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor," etc.

Materialism is like a lamp in an extremely dark cave.

Everyone around you has been indoctrinated with explicit and implicit capitalist and imperialist propaganda since age 0, with only very minor and localized challenges to that (only if they went to the right college with marxist profs or happened to stumble upon a unionized workspace). Of course you end up with people who are either willfully ignorant or evil, there is no other way to keep your sanity in such an environment. Be glad that you've been able to see through it and have a community of like-minded people.

The assassination video was algorithmically shoved in everyone's feed and collectively traumatized the people that watched it. Content from Gaza, meanwhile, is suppressed on most platforms and has to be sought out.

The consent manufacturing machine is more efficient than ever and that terrifies me. The right controls the algorithm because it controls the platforms, I don't know how we overcome that aside from not giving their platforms our traffic or data (and I'm skeptical this is enough).

I wasn't always a leftist so I appreciate how easily it would have been for me to be one of those drones. If I was just inherently smarter or destined to be correct I would have been a leftist much sooner. I realize it's mostly a Plinko game. You fall through life getting hit by pegs and they guide you to the slot where you come to rest. That keeps me from seeing people as inherently bad.

Also I don't think there is anything inherent or destined in these things. People care about Charlie Kirk because society was built to create him, kill him, and lionize him. If society is made then it can be unmade. Thinking in terms of "these people are irredeemably bad" goes against the foundation of being a leftist imo. Though I would generally agree that some people are so bad that the effort to redeem them outweighs the harm they cause/caused and therefore they gotta go.

I was talking to a family member recently and they were shocked, or, apalled that I even suggested that all billionaires are right wingers. In fact they were offended at the thought that even the Clintons are anything but communists.

It's surreal, but a reminder that I once also believed in the status quo, and that anyone on the actual left was a crazy and insane brainwashed privileged person (hence their leftist beliefs).

the people I work with live in a literal entirely different reality. One thinks all you have to do is have babies and the government gives you so much money you can live in luxury (instead of just barely enough assistance that they don't die but live in squalor) and that they just give illegal immigrants free phones and apartments in New York. Like I don't even know what to fucking say to that. He thinks all the homeless are just crazy or choose to be homeless so you can't just make houses for them because idk they'll just wander off all crazy. Obviously I assume he supports the camps, the lethal injections, or both.

what's wild is the guy gave me a little pin from the GDR and a communist flag from the GDR because he collects stuff and despite knowing I'm a communist because I'm very open about my politics I guess he doesn't hate me (i'm one of the good ones? a naive kid to him? I don't know) which makes it harder for me to hate him as deeply and absolutely as his opinions merit but like holy shit every time we talk I get blindsided by some straight shit that just staggers me into silence because the only thoughts I become equipped with are "jesus fucking christ you need like 20 years re education"

even my sous chef who is like 95% great opinions is really anti China-pilled to the point I showed her the headline for "experts say China's plans to reduce emissions not enough to avert disaster" or whatever (paraphrasing) intending to be like "this is just another on the list of obvious anti-China propaganda pieces that avoid asking questions like "why are we criticizing China for falling short when the West is literally collectively walking back climate goals due to AI energy needs"" and she just like shut me up and was like I don't wanna talk about China. After going "have you considered you're getting propaganda?" immediately after seeing the headline, which was literally for an anti-China propaganda piece. She saw an anti-China headline and thought I was being exposed to pro-China propaganda because... I don't know? you guys posting it here and discussing it is propaganda i guess I have no idea. It really shut me down for the rest of the day, I hate being shut up

Start organising with like-minded people. Fatalism is a result of being informed and not using that information for change.

People's consciousness will change if they struggle with you. They won't understand from theory, they'll learn by standing by your side in trying to enact common-sense reforms and seeing how the state/their employer reacts to it.

Great pamphlet that relates to your question: https://frso.org/main-documents/some-points-on-the-mass-line/

I have a specific intersection of privilege where I can just flatly tell people they're wrong or racist and I don't get any consequences and people will sometimes even listen to me.

Not saying I can change minds but I can at least make people stop being like that around me

i'm a shut-in. that probably doesn't scale very well.

this is the closest thing i have to social media, besides like some chat apps for close friends and family. i think the slight increase in effort required to share something with me cuts back on like 95% of the bullshit i used to see regularly, which was mostly peripheral acquaintances and their friends getting sucked into debating the designed-to-be-useless talking points of the day's news cycle. i hadn't really thought of it until now, but the faux-connection social media offers of easily/rapidly sharing mass media slop across networks of weak social connections seems like it could be part of that broader sense of disconnection we feel from each other. are we even communicating with each other when we do that, or are we merely acting as nodes for relaying talking points around the same ephemeral pond of people who don't really care to know each other? i'm not trained or clever enough to really elucidate what i mean, but my first thought to your post was, "i know what you mean, but that feeling doesn't resonate with me anymore." it has been over 5 years since i got out.

i work with mostly cool people, though we tend to only communicate via work channels about work stuff, local/regional issues, and some of us have shared our personal contact info for union communication.

close friends and family all seem to more or less know where we stand and don't really get into it with the big headlines of the day. i don't really volunteer my analysis unprompted anymore or send out articles unless they are pointed to a topic of mutual material interest, and don't really receive much in the way of news stories anymore from people. we all seem to accept that others stay current as they can and that there's a psychological price of trying to constantly stay on the edge of breaking news, so why push someone to be on my news schedule. when somebody does ask my opinion, i generally give it to them and it tends to dislodge them from the cycle of whatever talking point they were expecting me to have tee'd up, because it has all the nuance of me thinking my way through it spontaneously.

i read the news when i want, from a few different feeds. most are crappily framed. i don't really go in for spreading them around anymore, unless something is super relevant to any of the ongoing themes of one of my chats... which is frankly not common. my different chats, more or less, stick to certain areas of mutual interest. some people i talk to about hasbara-israel, world systems and empire, some i talk to about the geography of class conflict, some i talk to about healthcare provisioning in the US, some i talk to about natural resources and environment. you get the idea. these exchanges are asynchronous as hell, because everybody has lives, but they feel pretty rich.

i have some really close friends with very similar politics, and we mostly send each other absurd artifacts of an empire in decay on a regular basis. not like the truly grim aspects such as militarism, violence, the carceral apparatus, but more like the eye rolling features: AI hype, tactical dad gear, executive managerial word salad, cultural slop, wack bumper stickers & signage, "good thing but at what cost". because these are things we can groan and make jokes about without becoming despondent.

i am less connected to my broader former social media networks of years ago, but i feel far more connected to the dozen or so people i communicate with now more intentionally. and it gives me a sense that i am not all that disconnected from others more broadly, as a human, at this place & time, with similar material interests to those around me because i am no longer in the noisy pond, where regular people are flattened into whatever talking point they are advocating or railing against as they comingle with bots and outlier cranks.

I used to be concerned about this, now I just feel grateful my brain isn’t mushy goo

Alcohol

most people are ~~drones or just~~ horrendous

Yea pretty much

Most people don't need to think about or question the system, and so they don't, they ignore the cracks in the system because thinking about them is stressful. They are also told by the media around them that they are a brave clever Free Thinker for blindly absorbing whatever status quo opinion their preferred talking heads want them to think.

I try not to push back too much on this whole thing, it won't work. You have to slowly but surely teach them critical thinking skills and media literacy, you have to pick away at the wall of nonsense people are surrounded with and encourage them to pick up a pickaxe and start chipping away themselves, it takes months, years even, to get someone to a point that you can not have to worry about them falling for every big obvious thing, you can't force someone to change their mind, but you can give them the tools needed to change it on their own. Unfortunately, some people would rather live in a blind comfortable status quo and will never question things, but as conditions worsen, these people will become rarer and rarer.

Now imagine being vegan on top of that.