There aren’t very many of us. There are always going to be weirdos and outliers and mystics who have stared in to the eye of the demiurge.

There,s like a billion people in the West. Hexbear has 1k active users. And most other self identified leftists think we’re evil tankies because we don’t love NATO.

How many hours of learning about socialism have you done vs the average person stuck in liberal brainworms hell?

Even if you haven’t read a single page of theory from a book I’m willing to bet that baby leftists have engaged with dozens of hours and many of the people here are into hundreds if not thousands of hours engaged with the topic of socialism, either through viewing content, engaging with content, or listening to it.

I can only answer for myself, but deprogramming from it did require real effort to try and understand the world outside the hegemony. I believe that certain lived experience also had to happen that put my skin in the game.

Losing everything in a recession wasn’t enough, being poor for 20 years wasn’t enough. Covid and climate breakdown had to happen too. It has been a long road for a middle aged person who has grown up in a socdem bubble. Only now I get how little real information ever made it into my brain/eyes. Things that one sort of needs to know to not be braimwormed are nowhere to be found unless you seek them out. Our entire reality is framed from the neoliberal capitalist pov, from personal care to politics.

And I was always “progressive”. Always frustrated with how our parliamentary democracy seems pointless. I preached abouy voting, did all that.

The hegemony is so embedded in absolutely everything that one needs to kind of snap out of it. The first time you ask in your social sciences classes why are all these academics writing so much about inequality or even neoliberalism, the climate issue and the rise of the far right, yet there is never a mention of the system that holds it all together is where the tide starts to turn. Once you get the whole lack of material analysis and how obvious it is, you kind of see the paper straw for what it is.

Covid and the you do you-pandemic revealed so well how all states, as they are now, are not for the people.

I believe that arguments like “well why hasn’t the climate issue been solved if capitalism is so effective” are good openers to deprogram others. So is telling people what actually happened when the Soviet fell (neoliberalism), what the Greece crisis was actually about, what the EU does on its borders, how the EU is an economic (capitalist) alliance, what happened in Iraq with privatization, what is happening in Ukraine and drawing parallels to the way all our own care providers are now owned by hedge funds that nobody can hold accountable. Nobody I know agrees or likes any of it, they just can’t imagine an alternative to it as none is ever given.

Pure chance. I got here because I met some scuzzy anarchists back in 2016 who explained to me a bunch of things that just made way more sense than the liberal worldview I had carried until that point - but like, imagine if I had randomly been in a really bad and dismissive mood that day and not listened to them. I’d probably be on lemmy.world calling you all tankie fascists lmao.

So like are we special or something?

No.

Also raises the question, if we’re able to get over this BS, wtf is everyone else’s excuse for falling hook-line-and-sinker for it?

Contingent, random biographical facts led most of us here, but the vast majority of paths don’t lead here.

We are an irrelevant group of shitposters posting on a tiny splinter of a small website. This is exactly the scenario you would expect to see after a successful propaganda campaign. We are contained, and mollified. I dunno about everyone else but I was functionally excluded from power before I radicalized. Now I am still functionally excluded from power, morally superior, and switching between uncool and unhappy.

Believe it or not, by pure chance, we all have precisely the optimal combination of brain damage and blood micro plastic levels to give us superhuman powers of perception.

how the fuck did we get here?

For me, material conditions. I have spent my life under the poverty line and that shit sucks. I recognise that I and the people I love are being taken advantage of and that things clearly aren’t right, so I started reading about that and seeking answers - I expect most communists have always been similar.

wtf is everyone else’s excuse for falling hook-line-and-sinker for it?

Material conditions. A lot of people in the west (certainly anyone whose voice would be applified by media) are comfortable and understand that their quality of life and access to excess would decrease under communism, and people who aren’t comfortable think that their quality of life would decrease under communism. As well as that, working class people, especially people in particularly bad situations who would otherwise be particularly sympathetic to leftism, are driven too hard to have time to research, too hard to have energy leftover to investigate the foundations of the world they have always lived in. The current system seems to more or less function and thats enough for now, because fuck they have a job to do and kids to deal with and etc etc.

Politics is not currently life or death for the vast majority of people in the west, but simultaneously we don’t typically have the resources and leisure to investigate it just for the sake of being informed (and many of those who do are wealthy enough not to want to). Hence, until material conditions get markedly better or worse, a stalemate.

Unfortunately we are here because we have enough critical thinking and reading comprehension that we kept asking questions until we found the real underlying explanation to politics, history, and world events. Marxism explains the failings of the world, and we just happened to be patient and stubborn enough to find it. I say unfortunately, because of the unwillingness of most people to hear something until it reaches a point of survival. We are a minority because we think.

For the average person, it isn’t satisfying to keep digging for the truth, knowing that they probably won’t like the answer. They would rather give up and be confused and mystified when things don’t go as they assumed or predicted. Think about how miserable we often are. The more the average person finds out how evil the system is, the less they want to know. Granted, if they kept digging long enough they would find happiness through understanding, but the journey of watching your heroes become your villains is a tough thing for most people to accept. When I try to show co-workers a different way of thinking about politics, they reach a point and often shut down by dismissing politics in general, preferring to be ignorant than angry.

The fact that we exist is probably enough evidence that western propaganda isn’t bulletproof, but I think anyone could have told you that you can’t convince people that they aren’t struggling. The worsening conditions of the west is what is leading to more enlightenment.

the Internet is a open marketplace where different propaganda Instituttions of different strains compete, where chapo traphouse is one of them