https://alexanderwales.tumblr.com/post/792702088154120192/i-was-talking-to-a-friend-and-he-was-complaining

text transcription

I was talking to a friend, and he was complaining about his job. He had this whole thing about how he’s so divorced from the work that he does, so disconnected from anything tangible, estranged from the products that he felt only tangentially involved in making. He has a boring office job and dicks around a lot, I guess. And this feeling was something that he’d been carrying with him for a long time, and he felt like no one talks about it, and it was, to him, one of the chief ills of society, the way that we have no connection to the work that we do. And he wished so much that we had a word for it, that people would talk about it.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Marx called that alienation of labor.”

“What?” he asked.

“You can google that phrase, ‘alienation of labor’ and you’ll get a ton of people talking about it,” I said. “It’s been a talking point for like, almost two hundred years.”

“They’re Marxists though?” he asked.

“Most of them, yeah,” I said.

He looked off into the distance, thinking about that. I was waiting for him to ask some questions, or for him to talk more about what he was feeling. “Well,” he said. “I guess I’ll get over it.”

https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels

    • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      77·
      3 days ago

      Anyone working in counter-propaganda can testify to a curious experience: we’ll put in hours of careful research collecting an impeccable set of resources that undermines some warmongering narrative, and we’ll eagerly share it with someone who claims to despise racism in all its forms — say, an outspoken opponent of the West’s so-called “War on Terror.” Unexpectedly, we are met with a response that is somewhere between chilly reticence and downright hostility. What’s going on?

      From our perspective, we’re offering water to a person who’s self-identified as thirsty, and yet they react as if we were trying to poison them! They turn on a dime to defend the same institutions whose lies they were denouncing just moments before. At this point the sense of pride and accomplishment that comes from seeing through propaganda and putting puzzle pieces together into a satisfying historical account gets brutally transformed into its exact opposite: a sense of crushing defeat. In response to this bitter experience, many researchers — serious people, with plenty of experience reading and writing, and sometimes even of being published! — lash out. They decide that people have been “brainwashed” beyond the point where they can be reached by words or rational appeal. They “realize” that the masters of propaganda have been far more successful than we first imagined: it turns out we’re not David fighting Goliath, we’re more like an ant facing an asteroid.

      https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels

      • TheBroodian [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        12·
        3 days ago

        There very much is, it’s a technique Koreans used on American GI’s wherein they cleansed the brains of their captives of all the programming America had installed in them, by exposing them to the truth of matters. It was so powerful, these GI’s would defect and fight on the side of Korea! Their brains were as close to literally being washed as one could possibly imagine

      • Nacarbac [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        5·
        2 days ago

        Agreed, but I think many go too far in rejecting the extreme idea of brainwashing so as to also ignore that there genuinely are structural seams - not defects - in how our conscious self is generated from our brain processes.

        I think most of that is a pernicious shadow of dualism, thinking that the Mind isn’t a system of physical relations that necessarily interacts with its environment and that had adapted social functions needed to exist long before it attained a level of awareness of itself. We have instincts and mental reflexes we don’t recognise as nonconscious and that are autonomous of our intentionality. Even when they get called “animal instincts”, it assumes our True Human Self was still somehow superior to them and not itself a part of the whole that needs to speak for, and mediate with, the parts that cannot.

        Those elements that don’t require conscious oversight can be exploited to influence the rest of the organism, not by technomagic brainwashing, but through scientific study of behaviour - and it’s easier to do that on a population that isn’t thinking about themselves as a material system.

        …hm, rambled on there, not sure it remained useful, but I spent so long that I’m gonna hit that damn reply button and walk the dog.