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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 problem with Communism is that it's able to be packaged in such a simple appeal. It's like if there was a sexy way to sell flat earth. Most people really and truly can't understand the proofs for spherical earth. They have no hope at groking at any real level a critique of theoretical economic systems. They can handle memetic things like "communists are envious" but trying to explain the value of price signals or anything that would give them an actual feel for the fundamental disagreement is impossible. It's one of those areas where I'm sympathetic to the "platforming" argument by anti-free-speech people. Arguing with communists makes it seem like they have a competitive system that actually works and we could feasibly replace what we have with it. When in fact they don't. They don't have a system that has ever meaningfully been applied. The stuff they have actually accomplished in the real world amounts to "capitalism but with regulation" from which there has been a mixed bag of results but not one of them were evidence that communism is possible. And communists do their best to blur the lines. They'll call the 8 day work week a communist addition rather than an addition that communists lobbied for. These are silly points that any serious discussion instantly disregards but it's what the lay person is actually convinced by.
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