[dude with glasses in a communist t-shirt, arguing] I’m the only leftist here, your opinions are TRASH
[dude holding a theory book on smug, arguing] Read theory you losers, you’re all WRONG
[dude in an anarchist hoodie, arguing] Nuh-uh, I’m the only leftist here, you’re SHITLIBS
[the three dudes are now caught in a cartoon fight, glasses gone flying, punches everywhere, while a firing squad of nazis are targeting them with rifles]
[a confused nazi asks] Why… why are they still arguing?
You pretend, for a little while, then slowly introduce truth to them drip by drip. Like an undercover propaganda agent.
Since that’s probably what they’re doing to us.
I’ve seen this type of tactic really well displayed in this video by SquidTips.
This man talked to a fucking Proud Boy wearing a rainbow shirt that said in large letters “GAY” on it with a button that had the hammer and sickle in trans colors, mentioned his partner was trans, and got the guy to agree with him on the fact that he should be focusing on the class war rather than the culture war.
Even Proud Boys and people on the far, far right still think that what they’re doing is good for society. You don’t have to convince them to “stop being evil, switch to being good” you just have to convince them that “this is a more effective method at making society better than what you currently believe is the best.”
Will it work for everyone? Of course not. Some people are just going to be too far gone for you to reach, but there’s a lot more people than you might think that could be swayed, despite what the flood of media coverage of the extremes of society can make you believe.
I’ve found that even if you do this, it doesn’t really alter their behavior. A moment of consensus is never going to be enough.
People need to treat this kind of stuff like breaking someone from a drug addiction or helping someone lose weight. Without addressing the lifestyle factors that drove them down that path, you’ll never get them to actually change.
That’s why the brainwashing is so terrifying. People can fall into it pretty quickly and then it can take years and years to deprogram them.
Fair enough, though I do think this can still help with any broader approach to changing their overall mentality.
A moment of consensus on its own might not be enough to sway someone, but if they hear someone try and contradict what they had recently agreed on, it can then make them feel more cognitive dissonance, and potentially make them at the bare minimum just stop and think for a second.
If someone else is later trying to sway them in some way, it’s going to be easier when that person says something, and they can think “I remember saying something similar” rather than “this is the opposite of what I already believe.”
Plus, there’s also just the sort of “exposure therapy” factor to it, as well. A lot of people are radicalized to believe that the “opposing side” is pure, limitless evil, and that they hate you and want you dead, so just interacting with them can be enough to help slowly deradicalize them.
For example, this Pew Research article states, regarding the likelihood of people to support trans people’s existence:
But of course, that isn’t just limited to acceptance of people by gender. It also applies to race, social and economic status, recipients and non-recipients of welfare programs, people working in different industries, etc.
Again, not saying it’s at all some magic universal way to change someone’s mind, or that on its own it’s necessarily a factor that can override their overarching condition, (hell, that quote from before shows that it had a much smaller impact on republicans than democrats even given the same exposure) but the more and more this happens, the stronger and stronger an effect it has overall, and I’d say that alone makes it worth doing.
True. And I’d expect you’d need fewer of these moments for younger people than older ones. Every little bump might be the one that diverts someone to a different path. I know it hasn’t worked well on my older family members, but it was those kind of moments that helped my diverge from my religious upbringing when I was younger.
This strategy is dishonest though. We cannot use all the same methods of the far right and ruling class.
There’s a conflict of interest between wanting people to think critically and then lying to them and only slowly letting them learn parts of a truth. In another example, you can’t have a democracy when all parties try to deceive the voters. That will damage the concept of democracy and the existing supposed democracy.
There is also the danger of falling your own rhetoric and propaganda. Prime example of this is how fascism was created. Mussolini actively engaged in nationalist pro-war propaganda as he thought the continued war would lead to the conditions necessary for socialist revolution. He wasn’t wrong about that as then revolutions broke out in several successors / breakaways of the Russian Empire, in Germany and in Hungary. But eventually he fell to his own propaganda and created fascism.
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Well that’s why they’re winning, because they have no problem employing spies.