65
Help me dunk on my friend
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Don’t be too harsh he’s a cool dude, but he unfortunately has some capitalism good musk good sentiments that I’ve been trying to dismantle for some time now and i thought I’d ask for help with this.
Or you can just dunk.
Ideology is fundamentally a survival strategy. If he is being well-served by the status quo, you are extremely unlikely to argue him into an ideology that makes him less comfortable with his social position. The only reliable way of changing ideology is if the new ideology represents a better survival strategy to him than his current one.
I was friends for a long time with a guy whose success and grooming in a field [that he mainly got into due to his father's connections] inculcated a lot of libertarian-style ideology in him to the point that he sent me libertarian thinktank videos sincerely. In the end, he decided his explicit contempt for the poor was more important to him than me, despite everything we had done for each other in the past.
So yeah, everything this dude said was false, but it doesn't matter that it's false; It suits him. It's like a religious conviction (pick a religion you don't believe in), if it helps you navigate the world in a way that mitigates effort and stress to some extent, you'll keep believing in it and if it doesn't, you will drift away from it. There are studies debunking some of what he says, but you'd be hard-pressed to get him to engage with them, and ultimately he's more likely to just flip to a different version of libertarianism where the undeserving rich are "cronies" or whatever. Things like that rarely cause a fundamental change, and really only can if they are used as a catalyst for bringing him to an ideology that works better for him as a survival strategy.
In terms of values, you can show him that Ursula K le Guin quote
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
And he can simply say "nah, the poor deserve starvation". That's part of the weakness of morality in political argument, and the reason that scientific socialism (Marxism) avoids such appeals.
You have two options for changing his mind and there is nothing in the OP to suggest they will work, but you might know things about him that will help: Either find ways that his ideology is failing to serve him (e.g. people who say things like this usually have self-worth issues) or give him new experiences that his ideology won't be convenient for, such as personally introducing him to hardworking buddies of yours who are poor.
Good luck