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this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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chapotraphouse
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This site isn't populated by people that came to have perfect politics through their own unique virtue or intelligence. This site is made up of people that came to have varying degrees of counter-hegemonic politics because of the material and social conditions in their lives that alienated them from the dominant ideology of their society. Hexbear has no billionaires because billionaires wouldn't choose to be on Hexbear, not because Hexbears choose to not be billionaires.
Nobody here is better than anyone else, and none of you used superior innate individual will, virtue, intelligence, or wisdom to develop the correct ideas that everyone else chooses not to develop because they're too lazy, corrupt, ignorant, or stupid . This is just ordinary liberal exceptionalism.
"Propaganda" doesn't "brainwash" people because brainwashing isn't real. People voluntarily integrate ideas that make them feel better about their conditions and reject ideas that don't.
And so we once again arrive at phrenology with online-leftist characteristics
Oh that's completely fine then. Yeah me too
Takes minute differences I guess. I got radicalized through cycling, which is an innocent enough thing to pick up on it's own. But I eventually noticed that hey, every institution and law that's supposed to make this not deadly is smoke and mirrors and often actively works to fuck you, maybe these other people complaining about such issues have a point
I mean if you're a Marxist then I'd expect you to think other Marxists have a better understanding of politics and propaganda than the average layperson, liberal judgements about virtue aside.
There's a plethora of false consciousnesses and libidinal traps people can find themselves in, cultural hegemony is a powerful superstructural reinforcement of base dynamics.
I know too many people who embrace ignorant escapism rather than examine the system they find themselves in, so aggressively complacent in their incuriosity that they never develop any sort of coherent epistemological method. They're the people who find themselves caught up in hedonistic nihilism or fascist co-optations.
I'm confident in my opinion that the average Marxist is "better" than the average Joe Rogan listener. Someone who's read 10,000 books has undoubtedly expressed and developed a degree of wisdom/knowledge/virtue that people who've read two Wikipedia pages don't possess. Innate or otherwise is immaterial as far as I'm concerned, the result is a different way of engaging with information and the world, a better ability to identify propaganda (a developed "immunity" to it).
“Better” is not the same thing as “more competent in some respect”. “Better” implies inherent worth, that someone for some reason, possibly even a literal physical disability, who cannot access the same level of knowledge as us but still desires to and is a leftist, would not be worth as much as people as people who are able to access more knowledge are.
That's just semantics, in which case the word better can signify either concept and anything in between.
No it’s not semantics, it’s what the person you responded to meant.
That's fair, my prior response didn't fully take into account the context of the discussion, sorry
But I disagree, because the top comment (my interpretation of it at least) seems to be making the common vulgar determinist reduction of all choices and actions to simple results of material circumstances. I don't think this is a particularly useful or accurate reduction, especially in the context of this post.
If the comment is more pushing back on a general trend of liberal exceptionalism I don't have as much of a problem. But the post itself isn't an example of this exceptionalism, nor are value judgements as to a given person's ability to critically engage with things.
I believe people who study Marxism-Leninism seriously tend to have a more accurate understanding of politics and propaganda than the average liberal because history has demonstrated Marxism-Leninism's explanatory power in describing the relationship between past conditions and current conditions to accurately predict future conditions. That's very different than the OP's suggestion that humans have an innate hierarchy of value that expresses itself in the form of better people espousing better ideas, which is the same self-justifying vanity that led colonial powers throughout history to make the same claim to justify stealing land from "barbarous" natives who demonstrated their inferiority through their "failure to develop civilization".
I really don't think that's the concept the OP is invoking-- consider the choice of the word develop rather than something like innately possess
I don't disagree with your criticism of the concept itself, that sort of exceptionalism as well as the view of oneself as a static, immutable essence (or defined by static, immutable characteristics) are both dangerous
actually, i am just more built different and more inherently smarter and have more iq points than everyone and thats why i have all the correct leftist views
banger article glad to see someone linked it before i got here.
Everyone loves saying "built different" as some oh so fucking brilliant retort.
I don't think anyone is "built" anything, but people do often end up as impasses where they go one way or another, and one way is bad and the other is good. Some people choose to go one way and ended up here, others went the other and ended up in
Again this all just loops around back to hard determinism where we really can't judge anyone for anything. Hitler was just a smol bean what had doomed by fate.
It's a meme meant as a retort. Anytime someone says you can judge someone for something they "meme" "oh so you're built different?"
Yeah I was born superior, which is why I didn't lite that cat on fire like the other kid from my middle school did. Clearly thinking bad people are bad makes me a fucking Nazi.
Honestly I don't know wtf people in this thread want me to conclude here.
Like if we follow the logic some people are presenting, Israelis who put out lawn chairs to watch children in Gaza be bombed to death are no more morally wrong than someone who marches against genocide, nobody is better than anybody, we are all just victims of our upbringings.
Thing is if this is your view I can fucking respect that. But nobody on this fucking site actually behaves like that, any time anyone posts about, for example, Israelis putting out lawn chairs to have a laugh at genocide, we talk about what awful psychos they are. I show up and say "yup they are awful psychos and we can condemn them as such, we are better than them" oh NO NO NO NO! I could have been just as bad as them, we all are the same you see.
I don't fucking get it.
"those people are awful psychos and we're better than them" is reductive and ineffective at explaining both why they're doing what they're doing, and why it's bad. It's also, crucially, the exact language they would use to explain why it's right and good for them to exterminate the population of Gaza. Posting about how much better you are doesn't improve material conditions for anyone in Gaza, but it might make you feel better about (forgive me for making statistically likely demographic assumptions) living in a white supremacist settler colony benefiting from generations of human slavery and the genocide of an indigenous population.
If you believe a person is bad because they do bad things, then the person can change with the action. A person can stop doing bad things, and thus stop being a bad person. If you believe a person does bad things because they're bad, then the only solution is to kill them.
I believe that the genocide in Gaza is bad, and the solution is to stop the killings and allow the people of Palestine to return to their homes. I don't believe the solution is to exterminate the "bad people" until only the "good people" are left alive, which is basically how the Zionist occupation government would describe its official policy toward Palestine at this point.
I do actually believe this, more or less.
It doesn't mean that I never oppose people or find them loathsome and vile. I have desires for the world that are in opposition to a lot of other people's desires; many of my desires require certain people to stop behaving in a certain way, sometimes en masse. If I want to work to bring about the world that I desire, I should do what is necessary to effect it. This is, at the practical level, the whole of my morality. Where it comes from and the exact nature of my ethics is another matter, but does include a belief that people are not intrinsically arranged on a Manichean axis of good and evil. I understand hatred, contempt, etc. as second-order positions. For me, I don't find them particularly useful. What I am concerned with is a primary goal, essentially, general human welfare. I believe that communism is the best, perhaps only, mechanism (politically speaking, to achieve this and therefor view it as a tool toward that end. I really don't care what people deserve and who is virtuous or wicked; to me, all people deserve to be safe and happy. Often people inhibit other people to be safe and happy and these inhibitions should be removed, by whichever means are most expedient while remaining conducive to long term goals. This is, of course, not simple in its practice, but it is the guiding principle from which my positions follow.
It's fine if you're working through your understanding of philosophical determinism, but shaping your understanding of the world around "I want to judge other people, what helps me most easily facilitate that?" isn't a very stable base on which to build egalitarian politics. Ask yourself what you're trying to accomplish by judging people. Is it making yourself feel better, or is it making other people better? If it's the latter, have you found it to be effective in your own life? Have you found your life to be improved primarily through being shamed and judged by people "better" than you? Have you found others receptive to your shame and judgement, and grateful to you for improving their lives in that way?
If you're trying to change someone's mind, it's difficult to be successful if you don't understand how and why they came to believe what they believe. If your answer is just "they believe stupid things because they're stupid", then you have a built in excuse for not trying to change their mind. You can't do it because it's impossible. You're smart, they're dumb, and that's just the unchanging natural order of the world.
That's a belief system that's effective at making you feel better about the status quo, but not very effective at changing it.