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Suppose communism is bad (if you think it's good this isn't addressed to you but sure feel free to chime in). How do you teach normies this?
I mean the kind of normie who lives in a world where powers far beyond them do incomprehensible things like set the prices of stuff in the store, so that some of the stuff they really want is too expensive for them, but look, the store is full of that stuff, so somebody has all this stuff but they're not letting them have it except for way too high a price, those greedy assholes.
And then you try to explain to them how markets work and how prices come to be and it all just comes across to them as some weird bootlicking apologism because they're simply not on that level.
Is there a more "down to earth" approach that is needed? Normies who have deeply internalized rules of decency and ideas of "thou shalt not steal" (often normies with religious backgrounds) seem to naturally be anti-communist.
Now I'm sure some of y'all here (you know who you are) will say these people basically just need to be oppressed because if they have their way civilization is destroyed and everything is shitty for everybody, but if you oppress them then they complain but otherwise you have a civilization that hums along. But I hate this, I feel like there has to be a way to make society work that doesn't require telling a huge segment of the population "stfu and get in line or we're putting you in a cage". And I mean obviously violent (as needed) enforcement of civilized norms is necessary, but I notice there are a lot more people who are sympathetic to communist ideas than are actual active criminals. My point is more about these people, not the active criminals (who I support putting in cages)
Is there really no way to get through to people other than to just tell them shut up and take it because we're trying to run a civilization here
The universal method to explain complex ideas in intuitive ways that can be understood and internalized by everyone is art. You need to explore honestly the communist idea, dance with it in some form and reap all the lessons from it.
There's no shortage of such art, including by communists. Art that shows how stupid, arbitrary, petty, envious, it can all be. All the vices it encourages in men.
But the inherent danger is of course that any honest wrestling with the idea has to acknowledge the virtues of it as well. Communism like all modernisms is in fact admirable at least in that it has a project for mankind, a positive vision of the future, a greatness promised in earnest that one can work towards with reason and science.
The attraction to that, or other failed modernisms is not just a whim. And you have to recognize that the vices and virtues that lead people to consider communism are not going away. They are real parts of the human experience that will stay with us forever along with justice, racism, genocide, liberty, greed, sacrifice and everything else.
We should still explore of course. I think one of the greatest pieces of anti communist art was actually produced recently in the Chernobyl HBO series, and though the author probably wished it as anti populist it shines a light on the core problem that toppled the Soviet Union from the top. Its relationship to truth.
You want to make normies understand the flaws of communism? Fund an anime adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, video games about trying to solve the ECP, songs about the pettiness of the bureaucrat, and all other such things.
I agree with much of this take. Two of the greatest anti-communist works ever written, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, were written by a socialist. I know that Nineteen Eighty-Four is more broadly a critique of all totalitarianism, and that it was in part inspired by Orwell's experiences with English bureaucracy, but it also was clearly inspired by his experiences of being a socialist who came to realize that Stalinism was brutal and murderous.
And there have been many good anti-communist works produced by ex-socialists and ex-communists. David Horowitz's stuff is one example. He was a dyed-in-the-wool communist who ended up leaving communism once he realized that the radical leftist movements he was involved in both cared more about the success of "the cause" than about truth and reality and that some of them, like the Black Panther Party, had literal murderers involved in running things on a high level.
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