I'm not one to post often. I'm not really one to rant to strangers online often, even. But, after migrating from r*ddit to lemmy, I've had this on my mind and this seemed like the place to vent.
I see discourse about tankies constantly on Lemmy. This struck me as odd. Why are these so called tankies such a threat? Why do I see people calling themselves left-wing and attacking tankies more voraciously than neoliberals and, sometimes, even fascists?
I think I know the answer, just as well as most people who will read this. These are the Zizeks of the world: people who do indeed think in a left-wing oriented way, but fail to recognise that they're also Western to the core and the biases that come with that.
I sincerely care about this much less than the actual reason I'm making this post. That is: why don't these people notice that their talking points, left-oriented as they may seem, always end up supporting US allies or attacking US enemies? I mean, do these people not see that Ukraine winning the war is a boon to the US, regardless of who is "right" in that conflict? Many other such cases, but I think I've made my point, or, rather, my confusion, clear.
That's it. That's the post.
transforming oneself is difficult. The default mode we all have is what's raised into us. Tradition inherited via parents, and schooling. It's often trauma or something as un-anchoring as psychedelic experience that makes people crack and change themselves, and this process is so uneven and often incomplete because change is random and unsupported except by the whims of the altered ego.
There are very few unchallenging ways to honestly reject framing you've been trained to see as your only window to reality, and because of this it's easy for westerners to find themselves unable to fully break from the frames that define their understanding of their relationship to their society, government, the world, whatever.
I remember the day after I tripped for the first time because it really was that meme of like "wow so all of this is a fucking lie". I had to go to school and I was laughing at the things a teacher said [they were dealing with political material] because it was just fucking wrong. Presumptions about the way things are that the average liberal or conservative takes as sacrosanct, just all fucking nonsense. But I lacked the context and knowlege to develop this further at the time. A break was made, and it would take almost two decades to widen things further properly. An early lesson was that it didn't feel safe to fully leave the frame we're trained to accept as authoritative reality, because those frames determine social pecking order, they determine the jobs you can get. If you can't at least fake the faith in the dominant frames society lets you have, you'll be quickly ousted for being too weird. It's not even conscious for most folks, these mechanisms operate subconsciously to exclude difference of thinking and approach.
Even a good education is unlikely to, by itself, let you break free. Especially if you're educated in a prestige or elite context, you're being shaped to be the next generation of demonic overlord - the education you get is structured so that you're invested in the existing power structure - these places strictly do NOT educate in a manner that lets you go your own way intellectually.
So everyone from Qualified Experts to the average person on the street is operating on a framework that directly serves the interest of the country and the ruling elite.
I think people get fucked up because they take this to be conspiratorial, when social engineering is a field that's been in the process of being born for centuries now, a lot of the key players don't even know what they're doing, and that's by design. The structure is designed to maintain and propagate itself.
It's easy to break from it when you're the frontier of empire- you live with the politics of empire as a victim, as a deeply exploited resource.
People in the core are just as exploited, on the whole, but as beneficiaries with narrow education and limited interest and ability to educate themselves (on the whole) - they will not understand just what's happening.
I'm 34, and I have a love of learning. I literally get dopamine from study and acquiring new knowledge. How many freaks like me are there, really? Most people have trauma around education, or fully accepted it as a means to an end: there is rarely ever any love for the process of discovery and the requisite change that comes with it. Most people my age are figuring out how to live with themselves as they are, they're not trying to shake shit loose. My experience as a trans woman probably has more to do with my plasticity compared to my peers, but at no point are any of the individual circumstances that made me able to, finally, accept a more fundamental reality about my relationship to the world, to empire; things that are automatically salvific.
I'm a freakshow. We are freakshow. This is difficult work and most people who have the tools to wake up, never will, because the conditioning is strong, and breaking it requires the awareness and will to do so that the average ego just won't abide.
Something you said that really resonated with me is, besides the experience with psychedelics, the way that people will treat you as a conspiracy theorist for deviating from the "correct" frame. I think this is a major barrier for escaping the neoliberal narrative, as it is very natural for us to try to fit in, to not be weird, to be accepted. Nobody wants, at face value, to be the loony commie and ostracised.