Had this convo last night. Friend is confused as hell about what is left/right. Frustrating trying to undo years of doublethink.
The conversation wound up with this: How do you best raise a child? With one parent’s word being the only thing to consider like a god? Or with the help of aunts/uncles, siblings, family, doctors, teachers, community, etc, to help them form their own opinion? Then ask yourself why is it that everyone considering themselves “conservative” spends the majority of the time screaming about how each one of those things is the enemy.
Yeah, I have a terminally racist relative and was trying to explain to her why we should look after refugees. I asked her if her neighbor’s house burnt down whether she would invite them inside and offer them some shelter and comfort, and she agreed that “of course” she would. Then I asked about if it was someone from the next street over, and she immediately became hesitant about it. Sometimes I think as a species we just never psychologically evolved beyond living in a tiny village and fearing anyone we don’t know personally.
She saw where you were going. Or there is someone she’s racist towards that lives on the next street.
But this is the best way to both keep discussions level headed and root out the real cause of the opposition. Avoid the labels and names and just talk about general ideas, see how far they will go with “hypotheticals” that don’t trigger the reactions they’ve been embedded with. Even better, some street epistemology, often used with religion but it can be for any beliefs. The basic idea is to ask the person about their own beliefs and guide them in reasoning why they think that. It’s far more complex than just that, but that’s the idea, to let them come to conclusions themselves rather than some debate where their defense will come up and block any more discussion.
when talking to my parents, if I say “community” instead of “communism,” or “nobody deserves to starve” instead of “free food”, and “help vulnerable people” instead of “benefits” and “everyone deserves to feel safe from harm” instead of XYZ - everyone wholeheartedly agrees!
But if I let them go off on a tangent without guiding them, then they’re “anti woke” even though they don’t know what woke means
I love socialism but what is with North American kid’s love for communism? I assume you guys love the idea of it but you must know that the idea of communism relies on humans not being selfish and humans willingness to share the wealth and power which is not a reality. I say this as someone who has lived and grown up under an oppressive, communist regime, not just as someone who romanticizes it.
Communism is an idea. Just as capitalism is.
What fucked up things people do with that is an entirely different problem.
You can have an oppressive communist regime. You can also have an oppressive capitalistic regime. Both could be really good and beneficial for everyone.
Heck, even a dictatorship could be a good governing system given a wise and benevolent dictator who has the best of all in their mind.
The problem with all of these economic, governmental and societal systems are humans. All of those systems require a specific set of properties from humans in order to work well. The problem is, that not all humans meet those requirements. There is no system which takes humans as they are, with all their good qualities and all of their faults, to get the best out of humanity for humanity.
From an engineering perspective, this is really stupid. But it’s immensely difficult as well. There are no simple solutions to the complexity of humans and their interactions. Which is why systems with self-correcting mechanisms might have an advantage. For example, democracies. However, those too have many pitfalls to address.
Point is, communism is not inherently bad. It can be good, if no one exploits it. Even capitalism can be good, if no one is greedy and exploits others. There’s a lot of ifs. Improve the system or change it. Whatever might be better. But I don’t think it’s as simple as blaming it all on one core idea of a system itself, rather than to look how badly it was implemented.
Again, on paper. The moment you put together a communist government with humans involved, those same communist champions will give in greed and selfishness and “everyone is equal, except for me cause I help run things so I should get a bit extra and so should my family and relatives and friends” and so on. Again, communism is great on paper but has it ever worked as it was intended? Ever?
Ok, but why are you putting Cuba’s issues at the feet of the u.s? I get it, I mean Americans destroyed my country and killed my people by funding one side of a proxy war on my country, but the Russians funded the other. But I still blame my country’s leaders for giving in and for being bought. I blame Cuban leaders for the shit show that Cuba became.
Anyways, I’m not Cuban, but I grew up in a place where communists were every bit as brutal and violent as you get. So I have an aversion to a communist government, despite the good ideas it puts forth on paper.
Also add the word ‘capitalism’ in there. It’s like I don’t even get to finish saying the word before the people I’m talking to either zones out or start defending it with: “well there is no better alternative”.
… Doesn’t help that it described fascism as well.
I mean that’s, like, literally their name
People really need to read Marx man…
He literally described fascism decades before it was born. He said the contradictions of capitalism would cause people to look for solutions, and a “false” path people would find was that indeed capitalism had to be overcome. But that they had to return to a pre-capitalist life, return to the land and to feudalistic idealisms. Fascist Italy literally had “guilds”…
Marx said these “anti-capitalists” would see value in communist rhetoric, because they agreed with communists half-way. But they missed that the only solution is to move forward. That before capitalism, there were contradictions that inevitably led to capitalism, and it would just happen again.
Fascism is literally miopic anti-capitalism. It’s what happens to actual justifiable dissatisfaction and anger at the system without theory and understanding.
Yes, fascism really does sound like communism. It’s the goal, it’s how it’s born. It SOUNDS like communism, but has none of the solutions or the substance.
I have read Marx. I’ve also read Gramsci in the original Italian.
My point was just that “Fascism” comes from fascio - the binding of individual sticks together to make a stronger whole.
It’s literally “Sticks together strong”
I honestly don’t see how literally all politics don’t boil down to “apes together strong”.
Some of them have smart apes manipulating the rest to use their strength against their own interest. Some of them have apes going together using their strength to enforce things we don’t agree with, like racist tribalism/nationalism. But it’s all a matter of people cooperating to enforce and otherwise enable what they think they need to, to meet their goal.
Isnt anarchism more scattered and small groups of people fighting one another over power?
Thats what I imagine when I hear anarchism
And that’s very unfortunate that that’s the most common perception of anarchism, because all anarchist theory focuses on how cooperation beats competition. The “anarchy” in the name means that nobody has rule over someone else, but rather all members voluntarily help one another because it’s the most efficient and safest way of living.
We currently live in a post scarcity world. Yes right now. The only reason we have poverty in today’s world is that it financially benefits an extreme minority of humans on earth. We currently can provide for everyone and still live the same level of comfort we have now, but imaginary line on graph must go up.
Funnily enough, even the fascists agree. The man who convinced me of that fact, and thus of socialism compared to social democracy, was Jordan “Literally a Nazi” Peterson.
In some rant of his he threw out some factoid to claim that population growth can keep expanding forever because “each new worker produces seven times more resources than they will consume in their life”
Regardless of the literal brain damage it takes to come to that conclusion from that factoid, the actual numbers aren’t far off. It’s a bit more complicated but the result is the same, a post scarcity society beset by parasites.
This isn’t true, if everyone in the world raised their living standards to first world countries, we would’ve already consumed all of earths finite resources many times over.
