There's this red sails article that pops up every once in a while. Don't get me wrong it's a fine article, but there's a bit that goes "something something don't think people are brainwashed and just need to be exposed to uncomfortable truths."
And like, I get it. But...that's exactly what happened to me. I mean, I'm not going to say it was exactly one thing that caused it. However, genuinely when i learned about the Iraq War in detail*, that was basically what flipped the switch in my head. Obviously I wasn't as theoretically developed as I am today, but thats what made me genuinely want to read Marx, Lenin, Mao, etc. It was exactly that process of being exposed to information like that that made me want to be a communist, and want to fight for it.
This isn't some debunking thing. I think what I'm trying to explain is that my story seems to be very different from other people's, and applying my own experiences might not really work if it's not how things commonly work.
And, as much as it is important, I do want something more in depth than just "organize and educate." Don't get me wrong, that's good advice. What I'm trying to ask moreso is, what is the actually psychology going on behind these decisions here? Obviously there's no cookie cutter/one size fits all strategy here, but some direction would be helpful in actually attempting to convince people.
*To elaborate, I always heard of Iraq as just "the war." Kinda like how Vietnam was. But no one ever explained to me what it was and school didn't really neither. So when I learned it was basically the US invading Iraq almost explicitly for oil and no one got punished for it and basically everyone got rich off of it besides normal people while hundreds of thousands Iraqis died, it really shook me.
The red sails article I think has good intent, but overdoes it a bit in trying to debunk the perspective it's fighting against. I think what it's trying to fight against at its core is more or less the idea that people are "stupid" (and therefore easily manipulated into working against their own interests). But it goes so far in the other direction, it comes across like it's arguing the reverse, that people are actually more aware even than they let on. From that article:
Note: "insist on seeking the kernel of intelligence and truth and wisdom in everyone’s current actions".
It's not even something I necessarily disagree with as a practice when engaging with others, but it implies that there's no such thing as moments of behavior and thought that are simply misguided, impulsive, petty, habit-driven, mimicry-driven, or otherwise missing some kind of grounded thought process. In other words, in trying to do away with elitist views on human intelligence, it also tries to do away with human stumbles. The parts of us that don't necessarily make a whole lot of sense sometimes even to us. Because we don't exist in a perfectly logical, enclosed system. There's a lot of noise coming at us at any given moment, internally or externally, and we are capable of acting in ways that are, for lack of a better word, "stupid" ("senseless" might be a better word, since I think it comes back to doing things that don't really make a whole lot of sense, that are in some distinct way lacking in perspective, and which can have grave consequences).
Either way, it's not that this is a trait, or predisposition, or anything else like that. It's not a fixed behavioral thing. It's simply something that can occur under some circumstances. And to be fair, some actions can be sensible to one person but look senseless to another, due to a differing perspective. But this does not account for situations like when an action seems senseless even to the person doing it, yet they do it anyway (I have had internal tussle moments like these). Or when an action is done on impulse and then rationalized after the fact.
I realize this is a bit off the specific topic of the "how" that people get convinced, but I do feel it's worth going over. I believe it's important we account for the fact that people aren't always behaving in ways that they fully agree with internally, much less vocalize their own support for. That dissonance is worth better understanding and people's quiet discomfort with something they're going along with is, I think, one of the ways they fracture us; by getting people to view those things as irreconcilable, impossible to solve, and therefore a reason to distance ourselves from one another all the more. For our part, the dissonance can be a window into the contradictions people are navigating and a means of better understanding how to help people resolve them in a way that moves toward organized liberation.
edit: fixing typo