Dethlefsen
kiwifarms.net
- Dołączono
- 18 Lip 2025
To add to this comment if you've ever been blown away by the thought patterns of somebody else then I recommend people read the following:
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism by the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton - he interviewed Chinese and Western individuals in Hong Kong after the Korean war who had undergone 'thought reform' in Mao's China. This book is about the most extreme cases of brainwashing under a communist regime, but much of its concepts apply generally to any totalist system (an all encompassing worldview). You can see on the wikipedia page there some concepts you can probably recognize in the modern left and right, especially milieu of control, sacred science, loaded language and thought terminating cliches. MAGA characterizing people as traitors, the left characterizing people as bigots, slogans like "MAGA" or "silence is violence" and refusal to associate or engage with anything deemed woke/nazi are some examples of these concepts. Group integrity and worldview preservation are the ultimate goals. If you've ever been baffled as to why people seem to stick to ideology over evidence, rationalize their groups behavior, apply uneven moral standasrds, refuse to engage in rational discussion while claiming to be rational or speak in a seemingly indescipherable jargon then this book gives insight as to why.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, a cliche to recommend now, but genuinely the best book on politics ever written in my opinion. While it was written with Stalisism in mind its concepts like newspeak (weaponising language), double think and memory holing apply generally. If you're baffled why leftists call the MAGA govt fascist while supporting gun restrictions, why MAGA supporters talk of Christian values while supporting a prolific sinner, why the left seems to have concoted a different languge or how both sides seemingly forget what happened even two weeks ago then this book explores that.
Read 20th century French philosphers. However, that's a hellish undertaking I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy so just read Fashionable Nonsense by Alan Sokal which focuses more on exposing these frauds and gives you enough exposure to understand, or rather not understand, what they're saying (they loved obscuritism). If you don't know the French philosophers were leading figures in creating much of the bullshit that exists within humanity departments today and can broadly be blamed for creating "post-modernism" which in regard to this book is defined as epistemic relativism which in regard to this book, again, is defined as objective truth being an inaccessible fiction or, in other words, a "social construct". This book won't really teach you much about modern political movements, but it will expose you to the origins of relativistic thinking within modern political movements and though it seems obscure you'll undoubtedly recognize a lot of the concepts, like social construction, from your experience with popular culture. Unfortunately Fashionable Nonsense ended up being far more relevant than its original narrow intention.
