Why do many people here claim that liberals believe in nothing? : asklemmygrad

[-] materialanalysis1938@lemmygrad.ml 17 points 4 days ago

It’s not that liberals believe in nothing. It’s that liberals have a very contradictory world view. They want peace, love, decency, etc. but not at the cost of actually changing the status quo.

As other users have said in this thread, liberals are actually white/western supremacists who think they are loving and tolerant. So the vast majority of their beliefs amount to nothing in the end because they have no desire to remove existing power structures

It’s also why liberals always get rolled by fascists. They think fascists want to play by these silly social niceties and therefore legitimize hateful and down right ridiculous ideas from fascists

[-] pyromaiden@lemmygrad.ml 23 points 5 days ago

Liberals believe in nothing in the sense that they don't have consistent views or hardline values beyond preserving the status quo.

They don't have convictions.

[-] Perplexed@lemmy.ml 11 points 5 days ago

preserving the status quo

That is their conviction.

[-] pyromaiden@lemmygrad.ml 10 points 5 days ago

Which is my point: they don't believe in anything else.

[-] Perplexed@lemmy.ml 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

My point is that they believe in Western/white supremacy. Liberals use xenophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism to satisfy their desire to be superior and justify the class hierarchy. All of those hatreds are beliefs. So, in my view, they believe in many things, but I guess it's all about supremacy, yet not necessarily white supremacy.

[-] queermunist@lemmy.ml 18 points 5 days ago

Liberals believe stuff, they just don't believe anything is possible. They believe in a ton of disparate things they pick up in their ideological shopping cart that have nothing to do with each other and then jam them all together, regardless of contradictions or outright mutual exclusivity. This creates fundamental structural impossibilities in their belief system, and they just accept it.

They believe in equal opportunity at the same time and with the same intensity as they believe that rich parents should be able to help their children get ahead. It's impossible to have both, and they reconcile this by saying "perfection is the enemy of the good" and then find some stupid horrible middle ground. Instead of just eliminating debt so everyone has equal opportunity to go to college, we eliminate the debt for Pell Grant recipients who start a business that operates for three years in a disadvantaged community.

[-] Богданова@lemmygrad.ml 19 points 5 days ago

Liberalism is a system born out of systems that were created out of material conditions.

Maybe "believing in nothing" is not the best way to say it, but I think it's referring to how if you question them on things like: "Clearly not everyone is born equal, so how do we make it true?"

They will just throw more metaphysics at you.

[-] 201dberg@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 4 days ago

Adding to everyone else and saying, I have always seen liberal beliefs as basically hypocrisy. Like that's it, all of their idealisms are just hypocrisy. They won't admit it of course, but that's what it is. It's all that is it. And when you entire belief system is being a hypocrite, then really, you believe in nothing at all cause it all counters itself.

[-] amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml 17 points 5 days ago

One example posted on the grad isn't many. But that aside, liberals definitely believe in something. What that is can look confusing at times because it's often not the benefits they are made out to be and there can be a certain amount of cognitive dissonance going on.

But there are themes revolving around individualism, personal liberties, and a capitalist economy / power structure. This primarily benefits the bourgeoisie because they're the ones who can actually benefit from these things realistically.

As benefits go:

For the bourgeoisie, capitalism is power. For the working class, capitalism is lattes. For the bourgeoisie, personal liberties can be assured through money where laws fail them. For the working class, personal liberties have to be fought for and there is no guarantee the system will work for them at all. For the bourgeoisie, individualism implicitly validates whatever behavior they get up to as a reasonable expression of humanity and validates the idea that they don't need to care about anyone else in society if they don't want to; with the kind of power they can hold, this can validate horrific things. For the working class, individualism is more like, getting to decide whether they wear shoes indoors, in their place of residence; they are still beholden to society for the majority of their waking life, whether through bosses at work or laws in a court.

So, much of what the bourgeoisie gains from liberalism, the working class does not actually get, whether they believe in liberalism or not. The working class also gets out of it things like: enormous political repression, having to fight tooth and nail for any rights at all in the work place, being more disconnected and isolated from others.

It is likely that in the imperial west, because this dynamic is complicated by the benefits some get from the spoils of imperialism, some liberals who would otherwise more easily see how little the system benefits them more easily believe in it. Either way, I don't think the working class ones tend to realize just how much a difference there is in the benefits a capitalist gets from the system. The working class liberal is choosing what movie to watch. The billionaire is choosing what country to own. These are not the same.

[-] culpritus@hexbear.net 14 points 5 days ago

Maybe make a claim of what you think liberals believe in, and then someone can respond to you about that. Framing this as asking people to prove a negative is not really going to work out so well.

[-] Perplexed@lemmy.ml 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/7675567

Someone said this

The social consequence of believing in nothing.

My reply: Liberals believe in social-darwinism/eugenics, tho. Maintaining bourgeois law and order is essentially eugenics and consolidate the social pyramid where those at the bottom are sacrificed for those at the top. ...

I'm not accusing anyone here of anything. It's just that the other comment is getting upvoted, and mine is ignored. To me, that means what I said is not agreed upon. So im just wondering why

[-] culpritus@hexbear.net 13 points 5 days ago

I think the critical thing to understand is that liberalism has a lot of "beliefs" that don't reconcile the contradictions that are materially obvious to anyone taking a critical perspective about it. The phrase "the purpose of a system is what it does" comes to mind. This is a statement in contradiction to the core "belief" in idealism with regards to the political consciousness of liberals generally. The result is what you are describing, which can often also be categorized under the topic of "western chauvinism" for a lot of people that think they can straddle the line between liberalism and leftism (anti-capitalism). So from a materialist/Marxist analysis there really is nothing concrete in their beliefs in a sense. It's just like hasbara for the status quo, their belief is that liberalism can explain itself sufficiently to be considered the "least worst option", which is obviously false from a materialist analysis. I think the phrase is mostly gesturing at the concept of false consciousness that is common amongst liberalism defenders.

So in the mind of a liberal, they believe a lot of things, but they can't really explain those beliefs with any serious analysis of reality, only via thought terminating cliches and appeals to the status quo.

[-] Perplexed@lemmy.ml 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I see. The difference here is mostly that I consider liberals to be fully aware, or at least semi conscious, of the atrocities happening under capitalism. Liberalism, in my opinion, is directly equal to social-darwinism. The lesser evil they keep bringing up is them or a group that represents them. The motto for the liberals should be "Better you than me. And better dead than red." That is to say, liberals don't even believe in the possibility of equality. But the opposite, they believe in eternal inequality.

[-] amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml 11 points 5 days ago

Probably varies some based on the liberal you're talking to. But in my experience with working class grade liberals, it's not so much that they believe in eternal inequality as much as they believe that a perfect world isn't possible (which is reasonable on its own) and then use that to excuse the status quo by saying that the status quo is doing its best but it can't fix everything (which is based in a faulty understanding of what the status quo is for and how it works). In the abstract, this is not dramatically different from how MLs talk about AES states: perfect isn't possible, a better world takes time. The key difference being that liberals are defending a system that is not even designed to address inequality in the first place and is in fact there to enforce it. Whereas MLs are defending a system that is explicitly there to address inequality and is using a diligently scientific framework (dialectical materialism) to work out how to achieve those aims as efficiently and effectively as can be done.

Liberals will point at reforms as evidence of the capitalist system's ability to become more fair and equitable, but either ignore or fail to recognize the people who died or were imprisoned in order to make that possible at all and what that implies about how inflexible the system is to reform. They refuse to recognize the significance of what Lenin points out so well in State and Revolution, about who has a monopoly on violence, who owns the means of production, and how power flows from these things.

[-] Perplexed@lemmy.ml 4 points 5 days ago

If liberals think that equality of material wealth is impossible, it follows that they also believe in material inequality in a biological sense. So most liberals, in my opinion, do insist on eternal inequality. How would liberals explain that some people grow up to be scientists while others have jobs considered less noble? To think that a majority of people are born inferior is integral to liberalism.

[-] amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 5 days ago

I would say, believing that some are more deserving and some are less deserving is integral to elitism in general, which includes liberalism but is not limited to it. Liberals appear to take on a more paternal view of those who society deems less deserving, which is still a validation of elitism, but less sneering than the more overt forms. As seen in the mindset of charity*. This enables liberalism to sanitize itself as an ideology that cares, without supporting systemic changes in the power structure that would guarantee assistance and largely eliminate the need for voluntary charity.

*Not to say that the practice of voluntarily helping out someone in need is inherently elitist (far from it), but that elitist power structures co-opt this otherwise communal mindset to pass off social responsibility to the individual and the voluntary; thereby further entrenching the idea that the powerful don't owe anyone anything.

[-] m532@lemmygrad.ml 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I think it works like this:

Liberals believe only in white supremacy

Liberalism is essentially a cover story for that, since openly believing in white supremacy is frowned upon

Therefore liberals don't believe in anything they say they believe, so one could say "Liberals believe in nothing (about liberalism)"

Communists truly believe in communism, so liberals come off as fake (because they are).

Edit: accidentally clicked post too early

[-] Perplexed@lemmy.ml 5 points 5 days ago

Liberals believe only in white supremacy. Liberalism is essentially a cover story for that, since openly believing in white supremacy is frowned upon.

Exactly. Or Western supremacy. They are forced to lie, so end up hiding and mystifying the truth, and the truth is that they are advocates of a supremacist system. The idea of the equality of mankind came before the reality of it. Now, the libs want their cake and eat it too. But equality was first thought of as equality within the bourgeois class. This idea spread along with the spread of bourgeois power but not the reality of material equality. I honestly think liberals are conscious liars.

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