Propaganda doesn’t totally rob people of agency free will (more accurate term), if it did this site wouldn’t exist. People do have the capacity to develop critical thinking, skepticism, and a basic curiosity about the world that allow them to develop some resistance to propaganda.

You can hold people accountable for failing to even attempt to do this.

  • porcupine@lemmygrad.ml
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    4 months ago

    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 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.