How can you hope to change someone’s mind when they don’t respond to logic? How do you liberate people that are indoctrinated to slave mentality and refuse to believe that any alternative exists? Perhaps more importantly… why do you bother?
Watching the rise of Christo-fascism in the United States– and similar fundamentalist fascism in other parts of the world– it begins to feel incredibly hopeless. We live in a world that, despite its many faults, is foundationally built upon rational thought. All our progress as a species– philosophy, political science, technology, even the arts– is derived from critical thinking, scientific fact-finding, deductive reasoning. But the truth is that these faculties have really been reserved for only the “higher classes” throughout history, from ancient Rome and Egypt through medieval peasantry and straight up to the modern day.
The “masses” live lives of superstition, routine, and subservience. From birth, they are force-fed religion, which defines a de facto slave-master relationship as an existential axiom, a truth that cannot be questioned. They are subjugated by the power-holding class of “elites,” and are manipulated to believe that these parasites somehow deserve their power, that they are better than other people, either fundamentally (genetic or racial superiority) or simply because drove them to accumulate wealth and power.
This issue is not a left-vs-right issue, although certainly political conservatism has coopted religion to exploit this model far more than the secular or Deistic progressives. Yet all but the most radical leftists continue to wait for the “system” to correct our problems, or for some mythical political candidate to be elected and fix everything. This is still fundamentally hierarchical thinking, a subservience to a system to which we would happily submit if only it was a little more fair.
Perhaps human nature truly is fascistic. It could certainly be argued that our evolutionary path has required a submissive populace that allows a willful few to usurp power and enforce cooperation so that large-scale feats can be achieved. Those that consolidated power and resources certainly “out-bred” the free thinkers and non-conformists that abandoned fledgling societies and chose to live as ascetics on the outskirts. Subservience was therefore rewarded with the (relative) stability of kingdoms and empires, and the hunger by rulers for ever-larger empires– and the larger armies that they required, and the larger number of farmers and laborers required to provide for those armies– fueled population growth.
Over generations, the system has increasingly crushed opposition and eliminated any space for dissent. This is true both physically– as virtually all land is is under the domain of one nation-state or another– and virtually, as technocrats implement more surveillance, more disinformation, and more algorithm-promoted AI that makes us incapable of distinguishing truth from fiction.
The master-slave model won out long ago, and the suppression of man’s ability to reason is a crucial aspect to maintaining this system.
Of course, they are also made to believe that they are free thinkers. That their official state-sponsored propaganda is the truth, even when every shred of fact and evidence proves otherwise. That the anti-intellectual misinformation that the algorithms feed them is more believable than the scientific consensus of millions of researchers and academics. That any questioning of the harm that they inflict upon themselves out of some misguided loyalty to their political or cultural identity is sacrilege and blasphemy, an attempt to drag them into eternal damnation.
What, then, are we to do? Those of us who still fight against this system and believe that man should be free and self-determinant face a population that has effectively evolved to embrace slavery and submission. We offer reason and are met with hostility, not only from the elites but from the slaves themselves. We suggest liberation and are met with derision, or met with violence if our message begins to grow. Liberation is a threat to their way of life, to their identity.
Do we continue to try to win hearts and minds through patient, reasoned debate? The elites continue to create a world of chaos and hardship and fear, which are far better recruiting tools to their side than our side’s promises of some possible future utopia.
Our liberation cannot come without sacrifice. We cannot offer a compelling alternative to consumptive capitalism when people are conditioned to pursue immediate comfort over long-term benefit. We must temper our goals and attempt reform rather than revolution. Right?
This has been the “strategy” of progressive politics for decades. And to some extent, it appeared to work… the arc of history is long, but it ultimately seemed to be bending towards liberty. The capitulations that we made by working within the system meant that we could never achieve liberation, but perhaps we could reform ourselves closer to liberation, so that people would be primed for revolution when the time was right.
But this was naive at best and deliberately subversive at worst. The system tolerated democracy and some semblance of growing equality while it methodically laid decades-long groundwork: defunding education, de-skilling workers, eroding the middle class, building corporate propaganda networks that would gradually consolidate and consume all media outlets, stoking tribalism and racism, eliminating opportunities for critical analysis, attacking intellectualism as elitism.. the list goes on. I am not suggesting that all of these conditions were “deliberately” created for control of the masses. But most of them were, and the rest of them were quickly coopted to serve that end.
We now find ourselves in a world dominated by anti-democratic, pro-fascist forces and their sympathizers. The masses may occasionally wince at the pain inflicted on them, but they remain so sternly indoctrinated that they tolerate every abuse, so long at the “others” are feeling greater pain. They will reject any fact that refutes their worldview and are incapable of recognizing the blatant lies or the glaring inconsistencies of their ideologies.
This is unreasonableness. It is fundamentalism. And we can’t reason our way out of it.
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