From my aunt
From my aunt
And I thought I was making some progress telling her about the innovation under socialism, definitions of economic systems, and so on. She’s a doomer anarcho-pacifist btw. She has been wasting hours of my life recent by constantly texting and not really listening to me.
I don't need to learn anything else in this world. I've got it pretty well wraped.
Your aunt is not a wise person.
The opposite of Socrates. Well, maybe not. I can see her going around barefoot bothering people with incessant questions.
questions like "who's the manager?" and "can you go get me the manager?"
I don’t need to learn anything else in this world.
I’ve been wanting to say this for a while, and now would be a good time to do so:
Being the local expert on capitalism in decay, it took me a while to realize that it is impossible for anybody to have a truly perfect grasp of Fascism, not only because the Axis destroyed thousands of documents and the already small minority of witnesses and participants from the Fascist era dwindles yearly, but also because you simply can’t get other people’s exact same feelings from a book, or even a great film like Lion of the Desert or The Grey Zone.
To have a perfect understanding of Fascism, you would have had to live the entire lives of both the oppressors and the oppressed, feeling just how beneficial Fascism was to capitalists like Gustav Krupp at the expense of victims like Anne Frank; how sometimes it was both beneficial and disadvantageous simultaneously, as in the case of the Jewish Sonderkommando XII. Feeling how even after 1945 it benefitted organizations like the C.I.A. while also haunting thousands of ordinary people. Feeling every effect, in real time, that was directly and indirectly from Fascism. In short, you would have to do the impossible.
I can always get closer and closer to the truth, and I plan on continuing doing so. But I am not so naïve or arrogant as to believe that there will come a day when my understanding of the subject will be truly perfect. There’ll always be more that I need to learn, because that is simply a limitation that comes from living only one individual’s life. For me personally, this was the most important lesson that I learned from studying this subject.
Your comment here reminds me of Lenin's view of dialectical epistemology and human knowledge in general from his notes where he puts it as eloquently as ever:
Dialectics as living, many-sided knowledge (with the number of sides eternally increasing) — with an infinite number of shades of every approach and approximation to reality, with a philosophical system growing into a whole out of each shade — is immeasurably richer than “metaphysical” materialism, whose main problem is its inability to apply dialectics to the Bildertheorie, to the process and development of knowledge.
(...)
Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles or a spiral.
Boomers (and adjacent generations) really have this attitude that they've got it all figured out. They never seem to look around and notice that they (and we) are all reaping what they showed!
She’s not even that well off for an imperial core person. She’s just a everything-hating renting gen Xer who is scared what socialism would do to her rich uncle.
Good god, is your aunt a dunce.
So much for lifelong learning, I guess.
lifelong learning
Sadly an attitude like this requires humility and is very rare
A true, goddamn shame.
She’s a doomer anarcho-pacifist btw.
The subway sandwich model of political ideology.
Oh wow, this is really quite ridiculous. She's got her head proudly glued under the sand. My condolences.
There's no point trying to explain political concepts to those who don't wanna hear. You're wasting time and resources that could be better spent elsewhere. Let her have it.
Yeah, discussing these things with people who already settled on an ideology is only worth it in public spaces where passing apolitical people can pick up on something. Rare few who drastically change their position get there on their own.
it's worth a shot, drop the seeds on the ground and if they start to take root then water then, otherwise move on
I've noticed what (sounds like) a similar wall with more than one person where they are more or less willing to agree with me that the current setup of things is a mess, but the moment I start talking a solution that is more than reforms, the Cold War type of indoctrination kicks in (I'm USian) and I feel suddenly like I'm being putting on the hook to justify people or countries (which are in their minds) monsters. IME, it seems to have something to do with the extent to which a person still thinks the US project is some kind of "flawed, but admirable project", and believes perspectives presented to them by imperialist media on other countries with little questioning. But maybe this is a whole other different take on it too if she calls herself an anarcho-pacifist; although I do wonder because I was once at a point where I called myself a "libertarian-socialist" before I had any exposure to theory and I just sort of thought that made sense because it sounded like the "not controlling and violent" way of doing things. Demystifying and dismantling the fog of Cold War stuff seems to be an important element in getting through as well as serious reading of theory, if only I knew how to get there with people. I think Luna Oi's videos and streams on Vietnam helped me some with concretizing defenses of socialist projects, though my ability to memorize details and share them to others is abysmal, so I would have to convince people to sit down and watch.
I know what you mean. That happened once when I mentioned ML out of the gate. She doesn’t call herself anpac, but she identifies with the words anarchist and communist. Since she hates all authority she explicitly says she only thinks “communism” can happen in small and short periods (coops/communes, nothing more). She is very steeped in the idea humans are inherently selfish and so on. I have given her the argument that we’ve lived far more time in “primitive” communism during our species existence, but she rationalizes it as capitalism forever having harmed human nature, and since you’d need power to build a better society and “power corrupts” then it’s hopeless. I doubt she’d read ‘On Authority’ as she’s offended by the notion I’d try to teach her anything. I thought I was making progress with AES a few times. I gave her the positive example of Gaddafi and how their natural resources were being used to help the people, and she seemed swayed, but she used his assassination as a reason to say fighting capitalism is futile. I thought I made some headway talking about Stalin’s lack of wealth. Of course, she wouldn’t read the CIA quote saying there was collective leadership because she can’t learn anything. On China she at first seemed to think it was “literally 1498,” and once I showed her statistics like the decrease of poverty and government support she seemed to think “China’s forcing their people to have better lives.” I tried to send her videos showing China’s relatively normal, but she refused to watch. Later when I was talking more about their democracy, but admitted they weren’t socialist bc of special economic zones, she seemed to think they were actually democratic, but little more than bourgeois democracies and also that the temporary acceptance of capital means fighting capitalism is futile.
Yeesh, sounds like she is very resistant to accepting an alternative POV. I do wonder with people like that if they basically are only ever going to be swayed by example (e.g. organized working class power happens in their area and they become a part of it). IIRC, there was someone in passing kinda like that in the How Yukong Moved the Mountains documentary, who admitted to having been skeptical or resistant to the changes at first, but saw value in what was being done when the results came to pass.
Pov: Gideon Ofnir, the All-Knowing is telling you that a Tarnished can never be an Elden Lord.
Did you crosspost this on Reddit? This feels familiar
Nope, haven’t posted there since a futile attempt to get more people to leave for Lemmygrad a few months ago.
oh god don't bring them here too.. let lemmy.ml filter them first!
😆
Just avoid talking about politics to your aunt so you can preserve your friendship. You obviously care enough about her to respond to her texts so find stuff to talk about that isn't conflict.
If you want her to believe in socialism ask her to join in your activism. A lot of activism can recieve help from anyone with working legs and arms. That's probably not even needed either. For example - she might have a printer.
Just avoid talking about politics to your aunt so you can preserve your friendship.
To let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate. Or to touch on the matter lightly instead of going into it thoroughly, so as to keep on good terms. The result is that both the organization and the individual are harmed. This is one type of liberalism.
Mao Zedong, Combat Liberalism.