At least in my area of the US, knowledge of the CIA and US's crimes and whatnot is a lot more than it was a couple years ago. Nowadays, we have hot topics like Flock, data centers, and AI which all map very cleanly to (and are used to commit) said crimes. There's really no liberal conceptions that can't be eroded over time (assuming said person is, in fact, a proletarian). But that erosion has to be practical, you can't just bring up "Oh btw did you know the US used bioweapons on its own citizens without their consent multiple times?" or anything else like that just outta the blue, you have to actually connect it to lived experience. Bringing these things up out of nowhere will almost universally result in them just using the "bad apples" (it's just a few bad apples, we just need to get rid of them and everything will be good) defense. As Marx, Lenin, Mao, Vygotsky, and Luria demonstrated, THEORY MUST BE PRACTICAL. Theory without practice is a purely scholastic affair.

The same thing also goes with snarky rhetorical questions, random theory bombs, and thought terminating cliches like "That's just CIA propaganda!". These things are absolutely useless and are usually based in liberal egotism rather than any genuine attempt to educate. Even if they are genuine, no one is learning anything from you calling what they said CIA propaganda. This does not teach anyone why "CIA propaganda" is invalid, does not teach how the US Govt uses NGOs and the media to pursue its agenda, and is often deployed as a universal "stop all criticism" shield. If a teacher did not correct a student's mistake, but just obstinately called it "wrong" with no explanation, all it will lead to is frustration and resentment. If you are a Marxist in the West, you will have to live with the unfortunate and difficult reality that the vast majority of the working class are either liberals or "don't do politics", and work around that.

Ironically the Chinamaxxing craze is about as Western Chauvinist as it gets, and is a wonderful example of commodity fetishism. No one is celebrating the workers who actually did all of the labor to build China, they're celebrating abstract technology and making the same sort of banal racist tropes as usual. Yesterday, it was "OMG Bing chilling! Get it, Chinese sounds WEIRD!", today it's "I'm at a very Chinese time in my life!" (I consume Chinese commodities! Everyone laugh!).

It's literally the exact same grift as people in 2016 saying Japan was "living in 2030" because they had the Shinkansen, had "no crime and everyone is kind and respectful" and a bunch of 7/11s.

All idyllic illusions about China are best dispelled by actually investigating the material conditions of the country and its history rather than getting caught in PR fluff, and it's something that warrants extensive investigation both because China has become the new universal boogeyman of Western media, and because as conditions continue to deteriorate, people look to the more "advanced" countries in a vacuum for what ought to be done in their own, and because these people are liberals, they fetishize abstract technology and nominal socialism as in the Chinamaxxing trend. Always remember that Lenin's definition of imperialism was never limited to finance capital.

don't worry, you still have the material interests of a liberal you can always still larp as a communist without actually doing anything.

tbh i get this but i much prefer knowing of theory because i now understand more about why i feel like everything is always going to shit in the world. Theory has essentially helped me not be depressed lol

Being a liberal is easy because you don't understand anything at all and just get to constantly appeal to "the authorities" and "the experts" for all your opinions, without any understanding at all of why the experts believe that.

Me becoming a Marxist did not just affect my views on economics and sociology, but I started to want to understand every field a bit better. When you start learning other fields, you realize that ideology is a lot more widespread than just in socioeconomics.

Once you free your mind of this notation that "institutions must be trusted without question," you can instead ask yourself, why do the institutions believe these things? And if you study them, no matter the institution, you will many good reasons certain things are believed, but also, you will find that certain things are not actually believed for good reason. Even physics departments are filled with ideology.

But people cannot grasp this because their mind always jumps to "the institutions are perfect," so even if you lay out a mountain of papers and evidence showing it, they literally mentally cannot comprehend them because there is no way that their "trusted institution" can be questioned at all, so they just jump to accusing you of being a crazy crackpot flat-earther for not automatically agreeing with the institutions.

At least for me, belief is not a choice. I believe things because I have thought through the arguments and it made sense to me. That means, for me to stop believing something, you have to show me where the argument breaks down, or that it contradicts with some other evidence.

But liberals don't think that way. They believe things because "the institutions" tell them. So if you disagree, they will just flame you for not agreeing with "the institutions." For me, no matter how many dozens of people flame me for not agreeing, it doesn't change my mind, because no one tells me why the institutions believe that. Even the liberals themselves can rarely explain to you the actual arguments and justifications, they just tell you that you're crazy for not automatically believing it at face-value, meaning that's how the liberal mind thinks.

Liberals can, somehow, choose to believe things without any understanding of them, even on the most surface level. I can't do that. Even if it's a really complicated field that it's not practical I'll understand in great detail, you should still at least be able to provide to me a very surface-level argument that makes sense to justify why I should believe a claim from that field, or else I simply cannot believe it, because I can't force myself to believe things. For me it's not a choice, but for liberals it is.

I always feel insane being seen as the "contrarian" everywhere I go because I always ask "why" and that always upsets people. Being a liberal is easy because you can just trust whatever you're told and not think about things too hard and believe everything will work out. The political institutions, the economic institutions, they are all this way for a good reason and you don't need to worry about why, because the "experts" in "the institutions" all figured it out already for you, so everything will be okay.

You see this in how liberals respond to any argument that things could be different or better. You point out that the US's health care system sucks and even a lot of "moderate liberals" will immediately jump to "explanations" in their head saying well it's cuz the US is "too big" or something like that, a similar "explanation" they use when you point out its lack of public transport like trains.

It's something I've noticed a lot. You criticize something about the current order and you can tell that no gears turn in the liberal's head that even processes the criticism and even considers it legitimate for a moment. Instead, they immediately go to looking for "explanations" to justify the current order because they always assume it's, again, implemented for a good reason, and it is really hard to get them out of that mindset of accepting that everything is implemented for a good reason.

Humans are basically just slightly smarter versions of monkeys. We are not some perfect species of hyperintelligent Gods that makes no mistakes. All of our institutions are very flawed, some more than others, and if you have any sort of intellectual curiosity at all to ask "why," then you will inevitably find yourself ruthlessly criticizing all that exists. But that also makes you the endless contrarian and seem like a crazy person, because most the time, liberals don't even understand your criticism, because they don't understand the beliefs they endorse to begin with.

I don’t it was a horrible time where I had a deep sense of feeling the world is wrong but not finding any understanding of the world in the acceptable ideologies provided to me.

It is painful to do actually realize what the world is right, but that feeling is external and does not come from within.

Dialectical Materialism is the curse of every revolutionary.

respectfully (and with love) you didnt enjoy politics. you enjoyed participating in the illusion and fitting in with those around you. thats not politics. i think its important you step away for a while and see what you TRULY believe in because you said this is about a trend and your social life yet again.

also, what do you actually believe in? if you truly were that disgusted by liberalism you wouldnt even dare express a desire to be a western chauvinist and you wouldnt use the term ”schizophrenic islamist”.

Yeah you kind of cross this threshold where you look back and realize that all the "political" conversations you were having before were all infantile bullshit where everybody is just using guesswork to string along a story about how some other place is failing because they're dumb.

I wouldn't want to go back, but it does get annoying from the standpoint of dealing with people who are knee deep in liberalism and think that mild reform is socialism; it can feel lonely. Part of the issue is I am just not as adept at teaching as I need to be. It's a lot easier when I can sit down and write through my thoughts. Harder when I'm trying to recall things in real-time and explain concepts that I intuitively understand but have never had to explain in words. Then there's stuff like diamat that I sort of understand but struggle to crystallize as a mental model. Saying "here's the empire and here are some of the entities who oppose it" is simple enough, but trying to explain diamat feels impossible and I don't know what it is about it that I'm not getting. Because there are a lot of concepts that I am able to simplify/summarize, put in more general terms, but for some reason this one trips me up.

Sorry, you are now a refugee from the future and can only go home by building dual power and winning

once you go marx, and chinamaxx, with libruls won't ever relax

Real shit tbh but from a different perspective. I miss not caring

Liberal politics is often like spectator sports, which I’ve never found very compelling, either.
Go team Blue! Do the Thing! Win the Votes!

Tangentially, it seems as if spectator sports and celebrity worship/gossip are almost exclusively neurotypical pastimes.

Edit: I didn't fully read the last 2 paragraphs properly till @opiumfree@lemmygrad.ml pointed it out. I would consider reading first HW Edward's Labour Aristocracy, Mass base for social democracy.

=== Original comment:

Start writing. You're hitting the point where a level of passive (or not active enough) learning/understanding the world as is is no longer enough - ie your skillset is no longer being challenged.

When you write more deeply you start developing even more and it helps partially resolve the depressing pessimistic nihilism. Writing to Learn by Zinsser and Thinking in Systems by Meadows will help thinking move a long way (this is useful even if you have already started writing).

You will start seeing more the rational kernels of truth everywhere including the chalkboards (ie levelling up on dialectics) from which you will develop an even more fuller understanding of the world.

(And if you ever wanted to in the future you can then teach us mere mortals :) )

[Initially I wrote : "start writing longer form essays", but then I deleted it because the emphasise is on quality, that is deep thinking, as opposed to prioritising length. The priority here is to consider thinking deeply of each word and phrase before putting it down. And consider referencing. When you read or see a bad thing referencing it and other works to see what can you learn new that you didn't know or fully realise before. The more something vexes you the more you should consider it no matter the presumptions of knowing said topic fully.]