It's completely impossible to have any sort of meaningful conversation about anything that matters anymore because nobody will engage with the facts. Conservatives who've never put any thought into a topic in their life will say "well my initial assumption is obviously common sense" and the general public will treat this as an equally (if not more) valid argument than citing years of history and peer-reviewed research done by people who've dedicated their lives to understanding the world. There's no way for the left to convince anyone of anything if reality itself is shunned as political bias. It's so infuriating that it's pushing me towards a radically misanthropic mindset. How do we pull the masses out from this gaping abyss?
You bring back intellect and emphasize how emotion and appeals to empathy alone can’t build a better society.
Knowledge is socially formed. You've got to create social arrangements where knowledge can be collectively created.
>>2897586>You've got to create social arrangements where knowledge can be collectively created.Can you give a specific example? We already have schools and those don't seem to be cutting it.
>>2897595Yeah there are schools, but those schools are operating exactly as intended, and the result is the anti intellectualism that you describe. If you want to start fixing that, then we need to make our own proletarian schools run along proletarian lines, for proletarian needs.
>>2897608But how? Obviously the left can make things better if the left gets power, but the immediate problem is that everyone is too unwilling to engage with facts to accept that left wing ideas are worth giving power in the first place. We need a cure before we can start preventative medicine.
>>2897572I'm not sure but it's the most pressing issue of the present day. Across nearly all of the western world electoral behaviour has polarised by education, with the right winning the uneducated and the left winning the educated.
Intellectuals suck though, they’re horrible, smug people with the biggest egos around, that’s not to say it’s good to be an ignoramus but still
>>2897621The cure is the process. If you're not engaging with people to create alternatives to the systems producing things like anyi intellectualism then what exactly are you hoping to accomplish? If you're trying to clean up a river, you've got to start with the source of the pollution.
>>2897627Malice is always more sinful than smugness, it's precisely because the smug have done such a good job of constraining the evil that we forget just how much worse it gets.
>>2897638A malicious intellectual is way more harmful than a malicious dumb dumb
>>2897585>You bring back intellect and emphasize how emotion and appeals to empathy alone can’t build a better society.Empathy isn't the enemy of the left. Everything the left wants, whether it be workers rights or minorities rights, is ultimately rooted in empathy. If you simply believe that people don't deserve fairness then no amount of factual information is going to change that. Empathy and intellectualism need to work together if we're going to get anything done.
>>2897693Empathy doesn't lead to left wing positions. Right-wingers have plenty of empathy for the victims of immigrant criminals, women who lose athletic scholarships to trans competition, and Israeli victims of Hamas.
>>2897572>my initial assumption is obviously common senseThe neoliberal conception of freedom is being a baby brained consumer who makes their preferred choices in the free market of ideas.
>reality itself is shunned as political biasThat's the legacy of every "mature", "reasonable", "adult in the room" leftist austerity scold from Carter to Clinton to Obama and Biden/Kamala.
The reality is that the DSA left does nothing but victim blame the working class for responding dysfunctionally to their PMC anti-Stalinist anarcho-Bidenist ideology. Jacobin literally wrote an article crying about how an AI moratorium is "dangerous" and "conspiratorial" and "won't let us fight China". Very rational, ma'am!
>>2897622>the right winning the uneducatedJD Vance betraying his hillbilly family to gain social capital for the Jeffrey Epstein class is the dream of every American wannabe-kulak cannibal
People change their opinions not based on rationality but based on how they live their lives.
If their job doesnt require intellectualism then they have no requirement to believe its important. If their social circle all have similar jobs they will all similarly believe that intellectualism has no value.
You do not gain social prestige from intellectualism under individualistic suburban or apartment style living situations. It is only valuable when your social circle are themselves either take intellectualism seriously for its own merits or for instrumental reasons.
We need to create tangible physical benefits for people who dont live individualistically. For those that want to live thoughtfully.
My orgs provide events, food and services like tool libraries for our community. When people's daily routine bumps them up against people who they know will want to talk about politics, science, tech, history, art theory, agricultural science or whatever.l, then they will in their spare time read to catch up with their social circle. First they will to not look stupid, then they do because its fun to learn.
The issue here is that people first need to be deindividualised. They need to accept that some of their basic needs are gonna be supported by their community. We need to support and build that infrastructure.
When they do come to your local community, they need to bump into people and have time to gave positive conversations with others. Their social circle needs to contain intellectuals who are kind, cool and capable of teaching the joy of intellectualism in a very informal setting.
History is great for this because they are just stories at first but linking the stories together into the themes of history is where the real intellectual exercise comes.
Essentially, build community infrastructure to help proles with their basic needs. Engage them in conversation, invite them to dinner, become their friend, go to the pub with them, encourage them to start using community services.
Then have the baseline norm of conversation be atleast a bit intellectual and have ENGAGING, WELL THOUGHT OUT workshops and classes to teach people the basics they need to engage in intellectualism.
This works for us, it will work for you
Take a break and watch football. It's not that deep.
>>2897720Empathy without intellectualism leads to moral panic. Intellectualism without empathy leads to fascism. Any road not built on both foundations will lead to the same place. The left needs both to survive.
>>2897758Wrong. I have no empathy but I'm a communist simply because it's the most rational course of thinking + the universe is objectively material in nature.
>>2897764>Wrong. I have no empathy but I'm a communist simply because it's the most rational course of thinking + the universe is objectively material in nature.Capitalism is working exactly as intended. Those at the top of the hierarchy continue to flourish and grow. Why then do you prefer Communism? Could it be that you believe that hierarchy to be unjust? Can you not see how empathy is a piece of that worldview?
There's no way to justify making the world a better place without probing the meaning of "better". Who is it better for? People? Animals? Which ones? This question requires you to either accept or reject empathy. If you reject empathy, then why do you want things to be better for others?
>>2897772private appropriation of socially created surplus is a contradiction
Marxism anti intellectual
The revolution will genocide intellectuals
>>2897720Right wingers have empathy for the in group they percive themselfes belonging too. Its part of our cause to see themselves as what they truly are which is exploited workers not insane phantoms like race sex ect ect
>>2897775So? Lots of things are contradictions. Like orbits or growing trees.
Part of it is counterintuitive, but those who feel like OP have to be very careful about the delivery. A lot of anti-intellectualism comes because often intellectuals can be absolute douchebags about it and then you end up with people who, no matter how right you may be, will never admit it because your're an asshole.
People have to be receptive and then engaged. Think about how the absolute huge gains conservatives (social and economic) pick up because of the perception - and not without some evidence - of various forms of offputting lefties. This is also why the oligarchs have worked hard to conflate the most obnoxious social issue mouthpieces with leftist economic policy; its hard to get people to hate universal public healthcare from the taxes they already pay, but if they staple it to the dangerhair screaming stereotype that wants to eject from society anyone they disagree with and censor objectionable entertainment, its no longer about the argument itself its
>This thing belongs to / is associated with THOSE people. You don't want to support THEM do you?
which does the work for you. Overall, "anti-intellectualism" is a complicated issue but its going to require not just intellect but also the wisdom and empathy necessary to read the situation and devise the proper approach.
>>2897572>Conservatives who've never put any thought into a topicThey don't have to, because the bourgeois media and the conservative influencers shilled by the tech oligopoly's algorithm have already done the thinking for them. It's not like people base their views on nothing at all, they are bombarded with this propagandistic slop day after day, probably for as long as they can remember, after which it retroactively becomes "common sense".
I've had success with rightoids by just doing the exact same the right did to make them rightoids: appeal to fear and anti-intellectualism.
Instead of saying "uhm the bourgeoisie are le bad because (insert complex historical shit they wont understand)" say "these damn rich fucks fucking us in the ass though we do all the work and they dont do shit!!!", instead of explaining why capitalism is le bad just say "these rich fucks are weird and satanic not like us normal fuckin' people!!!"
It's all about aesthetics and vibes. If you look like a guy that would get dunked on in a "Ben Shapiro owning dumb liberals compilation" video then people will tune out. You need to try to look and SOUND like that one villain from a metal gear game that gets meme'd on and use simple wording (Instead of saying stuff like "extraordinary" just say "very very". Instead of "ontologically" say "real fuckin'").
Make people fear the bourgie ("They eat kids!!!") and also try appealing to their narcissism ("You're BETTER than those rich fucks, bet they cant even change a lightbulb"). Also use language that rightoids use to refer to poor people but with rich people, I mean stuff like saying Elon Musk is a bum ass moocher.
Appeal to macho aesthetics too, make fun of rightoid politicians for having soft hands that look like they've never worked on a car or done construction in their lives and that sort of shit.
>but the volk are smart and have their own collective wisdom an-
No. The people are dumb as fuck, get on their level and work from there.
The great problem with the American world is that the anti-anti-intellectuals are not intellectuals.
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