you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 5 points 8 hours ago (1 child)

That's also just propaganda. When we're taught random stuff, like philosophy, we don't necessarily jump off to a negative conclusion. It's mostly with political stuff where we're beaten down to think that things like redistribution or socialism is "good in theory but bad in practice", that "humans are selfish by nature", that "anyone with power is corrupted so we shouldn't aim to have it", and so on, so by the time you encounter leftist theory you don't treat it with the same grace you would if you read, say, Aristotle, but as a reflection of poor character ("they must have had a secret agenda of domination!"), or poor understanding ("did Marx never hear about human nature? what a dumbass!") or both. When we actually open up to the idea that people like Marx and Engels and others could be right, and read it with an open mind, we can very easily work out that they were right.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 1 point 40 minutes ago

    i think in general it is due to cognitive dissonance, which kicks in when ideas are tied to strong emotions. In the case of propaganda those emotions are induced by the language used to describe those concepts. This is definitely on purpose.

    But i have seen this effect with way more meaningless things as well. For example, i am a huge coffee nerd and when i tell people about specialty coffee, what it is and how i can taste, even while making an effort to not belittle anyones personal preferences, people still get weirdly defensive about their tastes.

    So i really think it is a more general societal problem of valueing knowledge over the process of learning and understanding. This in itself is a useful trait because it makes people way more susceptible to propaganda

  • source
  • parent