All that the establishment has to do is turn up the propaganda dial and within a few weeks 90% of so-called leftists will get in line, just like they did in the Cold War, and just like they did in Europe in 1914. And if any party believes something counter to the propaganda, they have to hide their power level because otherwise they’ll be crucified in the town square.

The propaganda power on display here is awesome. I would say in the 21st century it’s qualitatively more all-encompassing and insidious than it has ever been before in history. Nothing is new with human nature or the structure of society; Marx wrote of this exact problem in the 19th century:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.

But the difference today is technology. Everyone has a camera on them at all times to produce content, and everyone is plugged into social media where they can be immersed in a thousand individual events as consumers. It’s impossible to challenge the ruling narrative when there’s so much evidence confirming it in front of you at all times. No minority viewpoint can survive once the the machine starts churning. @UlyssesT forgive me, but I’ll quote a lib rationalist with an insightful take:

Online & mainstream media and social networking have become increasingly misleading as to the state of the world by focusing on ‘stories’ and ‘events’ rather than trends and averages. This is because as the global population increases and the scope of media increases, media’s urge for narrative focuses on the most extreme outlier datapoints—but such datapoints are, at a global scale, deeply misleading… This creates an epistemic environment deeply hostile to understanding reality, one which is dedicated to finding arbitrary amounts of and amplifying the least representative datapoints.

Being a bazinga-brained lib, Gwern just assumes that media will focus on random outliers to be more profitable. But when you bring in Marx or critical theory you come to the horrifying realization that class and other interests mean that what the media emphasizes isn’t random, it’s biased toward entrenching existing power structures, particularly the interests of capital. They will always be able to find the most sensational reports (true or not, e.g. genocide in Xinjiang or Russians bombing an active hospital or Gaddafi slaughtering civilians) and repeat them ad nauseum to push narratives that defend their interests. So people’s hearts are perpetually breaking over alleged atrocities and willing to compromise and carry water for the empire because absolute red-line moral issues always seem to be in play. The emotional power of this shit is overwhelming for almost anyone, whether you stand your ground as a leftist or not.

I don’t know what the fuck the solution here is. I think it’s probably hopeless. Especially in this technological milieu, leftists in the US and Europe will always be flaky and run back to being libs at a moment’s notice- unless their material conditions are already severely affected, and even then they’re likely to misattribute blame according to the wishes of propaganda (“damn Putler making the gas prices go up”). Maybe we can hope that some kind of decline can dismantle the propaganda machine and create enough suffering to get people really interested in change, and we can stop the imperialism that way. I like this Gowans quote:

People don’t overturn an existing political and economic order because they dislike militarism intellectually or regard exploitation as morally indefensible. They overturn existing orders when the conditions of their lives become intolerable, and revolution becomes the only way out—which is more likely to happen in the countries which are the victims of militarism and imperialism than in the ones which are the perpetrators…

Then again, I also buy Matt’s position saying basically that we’re very unlikely to end up with a proletarian revolution if there’s a real crisis of capital, since there is no class consciousness among the workers; we’ll divide along culture war lines instead, hand in hand with capital. So really for euro-americans the only true hope is for a collapse to barbarism and for everyone we know and love to die so that the third world can thrive.

Wonderful. :sadness-abysmal: