Most CHUDs didn't go to underfunded intercity schools with moldy textbooks. They went to well funded suburban middle class schools

A world-class education in astrology or alchemy is still going to leave you poorly prepared to understand the world outside of those frameworks.

A world-class education designed to indoctrinate people into American exceptionalism, starting from kindergarten where they recite the pledge every morning, up through high School, ends up indoctrinating people into American exceptionalism.

The step of American exceptionalism into fascism, is not a leap, it's a sideways shuffle.

We can understand WHY and HOW people are indoctrinated into the system they take part in. That doesn't mean we absolve them of the responsibility they have for taking part in it. We can recognize someone is a victim of the social conditioning they were subjected to while still holding them responsible for the way they victimize others.

It's not poor education like they didn't have money to teach us as a nation, it's poor education as in MISEDUCATION, like we are taught wrongthink on purpose and imbued with fascist though processes and 'common sense' it's all part of the same system of perpetuation

It's like how people blame the glorification comps of Walter White and Tony Soprano on 'media illiteracy'. Sure, they are media illiterate, but who would have thought that a culture that values selfish power and sadism over effective teamwork and leadership would naturally glorify selfish power-hungry sadists, regardless of the shown consequences of their actions?

I was homeschooled by young earth creationists and still figured out capitalism is unworkable and reducing human suffering would be a good thing.

I mean I get your point, but I think calling it “cope” is a bit of a stretch. The way modern education is structured does not encourage the development of critical thinking or empathy.

“On the level of individuals and civilizations, personality predates ideology. Meaning, before you were a fascist, you were a bully and an asshole.”

-Brennan Lee Mulligan

It's interesting that liberals refuse to see the school system as a tool for propaganda, they are generally not saying schools should teach more liberal values, but instead have a vague idea of "more better schooling = more liberal electorate." The reactionaries have no problem seeing the propaganda potential, although they are very wrong about the current state of that propaganda.

But yes, the problem with education as a solution to social problems is that the idea is too all-powerful, it is very easy to end up with an extremely one-sided theory that has no actual praxis.

There's two kinds of fascists.

There are the people who become fascist because capitalism and imperialism and colonialism are in their material interests. These people need to defend the empire from decay, and they range from educated to very educated. They know exactly what they support because it benefits them, materially. They're petite bourgeois, they're settlers, etc. I think we can assign some determinism here, their beliefs are just a product of their social class and material conditions. Education can only help so much here.

Then there are the people who become fascists because they have false consciousness, and these people range from poorly educated to miseducated. They have no idea what they support, they don't understand their own material interests, and they simply fell into these beliefs because of social conditioning from the first group of fascists. In some cases, the material conditions themselves will force them to rise above their social conditioning because they'll educate themselves, but usually someone else needs to step in and educate them. They really do benefit from education, though, because they just need to be informed.

I don't know if culpability is ever actually useful to discuss in either of those cases. It doesn't really change what we have to do.

It's liberal idealism to think it's because they just haven't had access to the correct ideas yet

I don't think that this is a productive way to view things.

Poor education does not simply mean underfunded schools. It also encompasses the content of their education being inadequate for helping people to actual understand the world, which encompasses the vast majority of the education in the US as regards understanding history, politics, critical thinking and humanity generally. A fancy textbook and well-paid teacher professing false history, misanthropy, and truncated critical thinking is still a poor education.

Probably the most critical error here is that you talk about their "values" and that they "like being fascists" as though these things just came from the aether or were inborn. You cannot have a functional analysis this way. Why do they have those values? Why do they like fascism? Very plainly, in most cases, they were reared to, and that is what they were educated and enculturated toward by their schools, their parents, and the media and local culture.

And of course, there is the issue that some people benefit from fascist bullshit in the short term -- or at least were led by their backwards education (etc.) to believe they would -- and some people don't, which is largely a class issue and the reason why the petite bourgeoisie has always been the popular base of fascism.

But I have to think humans have some capacity of will to rise above their social conditioning, if they're willing didn't society would never evolve or change for the better.

I strongly encourage you to read more from Marx and Engels (I'll default to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and audiobook), because the issue of society and people developing is one of the most central elements of their philosophy. In short, the development of new technology and organizational methods has had the historical effect of changing the relations of production and who the ruling class is (from agrarian patriarchs to slave masters to nobility to capitalists) and how the individual relates to society, and with all of these changes the ruling ideology changes as a byproduct of and attempt to reinforce these new relations. This also produces different values among different classes because their individual relations to production (and therefore the basic shapes of their lives and material agency) are different, and this inevitably pits different strata of people against each other.

It's not like we are waiting around for people to be born with better souls than all these people who just happen to have bad souls so that the good soul people can lead us away from this dirty and wrong world to a better one generated from their moral sensibility. Nor are we just waiting for enough people to spontaneously choose to have good souls because, you know, if everyone just agreed to be good people, we could have a good world.

We need to understand humanity as existing in a dialectical relationship with its environment, i.e. as being shaped by its environment and also with the power to reshape its environment and therefore reshape itself.

Yeah agreed. I'm not an educated person but I'm also not blind. Well I am blind but not mentally.

Point I mean to say is, the main driver in them is hate. The stupidity plays a role in fueling the hate. But the people capitalizing on their hate are highly educated billionaires so lack of education can't be solely blamed. If anything it was an abundance of miseducation

they're fascists because fascism speaks to them and their values.

Okay. So where'd they get their values from?

Education and intelligence isn't a straight line. Just because a CHUD is well educated on statistics doesn't mean they're going to be well versed on history for example.

I liken it to athletics. Someone trained in tennis might not be great at hurdles just because they're 'sporty' just as a person might not have a well rounded understanding of reality just because they went to an expensive school.

We are heavily influenced by our environment and live in a culture where certain things are either not taught, are taught wrong, or are suppressed in order to function in a social system that will render you homeless for not being a certain way. This has to be the case for anyone to believe in fascism because it is a self destructive ideology for any social species to follow for a long period of time. If some mathematical genius is making a killing off of fossil fuels while global warming melts his face off, he is still uneducated, despite being educated.

Anyone doing a coherent materialist observation of reality would quickly abandon fascism as a dead end for humanity. They only reason they would do otherwise would be out of delusion, in which case they are no longer acting within reality anyway.

The education systems of capitalist countries don't exist to teach you how to live in reality, they teach you how to do your role under capitalism. So when leftists say 'poorly educated', they don't mean 'were poor and didn't have access to an expensive school' they mean 'Were raised in an environment where they were given faulty tools of material observation'. It's not elitism against the financial status of the uneducated anymore than wanting decent well rounded healthcare is elitism against the financial status of sick Americans.

Or something like that. I'm tired so this might be just an incoherent ramble.

I've learned from many years of being around these people that many of them are just hateful disgusting leeches at the end of the day. I guess they have some brain damage or something that causes them to be hateful and selfish and total dicks to whoever the "out group" is today. There's no converting them, no way they're going to see our views, and no way they're going to stop hurting others just for the thrill of it.

It's us or them.

I get why Stalin and Mao did what they had to do. We need a cultural revolution here to take out the white trash!

there's a bunch of dentists who are creationists because they learned one hyperspecific specialty and no critical thinking.

But I have to think humans have some capacity of will to rise above their social conditioning, if they're willing didn't society would never evolve or change for the better.

Dialectics playing out to a conclusion that resolves a contradiction does not require anyone to rise above anything.

CHUD aren't fascists because their social studies teacher was underpaid, they're fascists because fascism speaks to them and their values. They are fascists at the end of the day because they like being fascists.

They're fascists because they were indoctrinated into Liberalism from birth and since reality doesn't agree with Liberal.ideology, they become fascists to preserve capitalism and "do it right this time" (ie, make it work for ME!). They're fascists because they're Liberals. They're fascists because they want capitalism. They're fascists because they're ethnic supremacists. They're fascists because they believe in capitalism as HuMaN naTuRe. They're fascists because Liberalism conditions fascists. And it aint just chuds. Small L libs are not much different, they just couch their hateful shit in dressed up language to obfuscate the fact that they're fascists too.

It is bad education, evidenced by fascists actively trying to make schools worse, like it is clearly working. But you're also right that fascism is a nascent tendency within capitalism itself, and manifests primarily in the middle class and poor petty bourg, because the middle class is constantly being crushed by capitalism. As the state in its function to mitigate class antagonisms gets swept away, this tendency becomes more acute and activates the Hitler particles in more and more people.

EU social democracies have much better schools, higher education for lower cost and they still have major viable fascist parties and movements. Education is fundamentally progressive, but there are all different kinds of education, and progress is not a straight line, but more like building something brick by brick. The ruling class has lots of experience systematically stifling forms of education that risk activating genuine contemplation, self actualization, curiosity, social awareness, and class consciousness. This makes it much easier to smuggle in narratives about race, class and immigration that keep the bourg on top and the workers divided

Most CHUDs didn't go to underfunded intercity schools with moldy textbooks. They went to well funded suburban middle class schools which, yeah are still US public schools, but still provide better educational opportunities than what most people in the world have.

The discussion of how bad American schools are is not complete without acknowledging the class and race based aspects of its inequality. We have some of the best schools in the industrialized world, and ALSO many of the worst (and of course our average is really bad), and that is by design.

Regarding the propaganda thing, you're 100% right. If someone has humanist or good political instincts, but believes a bunch of propaganda, that produces a wholly different set of political beliefs than someone who has chud political instincts and believes a bunch of propaganda. Those people can be deprogrammed in a way that chuds can't (although many chuds can and do deprogram themselves, for them it has to start with valuing empathy and equality, while the others can be reached more directly).