Comradeship // Freechat

On a related note, I’ve also noticed that we basically have a Darwinian competition between different world models. Different groups of people subscribe to a particular explanation of how the world works, and that becomes their ideology. Some people go through this process consciously, but vast majority just internalize the world view from people around them as they grow up.

Once somebody settles on a particular world view then it’s natural for them to reject conflicting views since there’s no way to prove whether one view or the other is correct in most cases. And I tend to think of this in terms of thermodynamics where people have complex graphs of ideas in their heads, and when any particular idea is challenged then the whole set of ideas associated with it has to be reworked as well. It’s easier to simply discard conflicting ideas than to go through the process of rethinking a bunch of things you’ve internalized over many years. This is why it’s typically very hard to change people’s ideas no matter how good your argument is. The cost of integrating this new information is just too high to bother in most cases.

What typically causes people to go through this process is when they start noticing a drift between their world model and the material reality they experience. For example, when mainstream liberals start experiencing a continued decline in their material conditions then it becomes difficult to continue believing that everything is getting better and that they’re living their best lives under the most enlightened system possible.

Hence why a lot of people started questioning things after 2008 crash, and as economic disasters continue, we see more and more people falling out of the liberal mainstream. Unfortunately, many of these people end up on the right because the right ideology is very close to liberal ideology, so it’s much easier for people to internalize those ideas. The right leans into the common tropes people have been indoctrinated into. They’ll talk about immigrants stealing jobs, or the government stifling innovation, etc. These slogans build directly on the capitalist propaganda people have already been indoctrinated into. This makes the ideology very accessible to people falling out of the mainstream.

The left has been systematically dismantled in the west. Most people can’t even define what communism is, all they know is that it’s bad and scary. That’s what been drilled into their heads their whole lives. Meanwhile, the right has a big and vibrant platform where they often discuss real issues that people experience. And this is precisely what hooks people in.

They’ve already come to realize that libs are gaslighting them, and that the system isn’t working on their interest because they see their standard of living collapsing while mainstream media keeps telling them they’re living in the best economy ever. So, when right wingers come out and point out that the economy sucks and that regular working class people are being screwed over, that resonates with the lived experience people have.

On the other hand, moving left requires restructuring your whole world view and rejecting everything you’ve been taught your whole life. Some people are able to make the intellectual leap required, but most are not.

I think that the left needs right now more than anything is to focus on packaging the ideas in a way that’s easily digestible for people who are falling out of the political mainstream. The pitch has to be at least as appealing as whatever the right is peddling.