As in, not known to you IRL.
I’ve occasionally brought it up before, but a while back in my reddit days I was in a thread where a “professional deprogrammer” had popped in and was talking about how to “deprogram” conservatives and get them to shift left in their views. It centered around restoring their sense of community and belonging with more balanced viewpoint folks IRL and away from their online echo chambers.
I asked them if they had any way to convert someone you encounter wholly online and they said that it was basically impossible, IRL you have a decent chance, but not online.
I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit, so now I’m curious if anybody here has actually gotten an online conservative to come to the dark side light side?
I don’t argue with conservatives online to try and change their minds. I argue with them to change the minds of people reading the argument. For every social media user that posts content, there are a thousand lurkers. I post arguments so hopefully some of those lurkers might change their mind away from nationalist authoritarianism
I argue with them to change the minds of people reading the argument.
This is why I would labour to keep arguing until either I get last word, or the interlocutor clearly runs out of good arguments. You can’t reason with people who never reason themselves into an idea to begin with. But you can convince the readers that the idea is dangerous and to keep away!
I drifted slowly from right-libertarian to a more leftish position: pro-union, pro-social-programs, skeptical of the compatibility of unregulated capitalism with individual freedom. Still no fan of tankies.
This wasn’t from anyone sitting down and trying to convince me, though. Part of it was discovering how close right-libertarianism had always been to white-supremacism: some old Ron Paul newsletters were unpleasantly enlightening. Part was seeing people who called themselves “libertarians” line up with the far right to support state violence, especially against black and brown people. And heck, part was from getting richer and seeing how that worked.
I have a lot of sympathy for the frustrations that get young men into right-wing positions and occasionally I try to puncture some of the nonsense they’re being fed.
I was also right libertarian, although I have been called a fascist for that, , anyway I shifted from that slowly into anarchocristianism and I will stay here. I just don’t believe in government anymore only in communities and obviously in God but that’s another story.
I just want people to have their needs covered, to have strong sense of communities (love your neighbors) in non violent environments and I think human government is inherently violent either physically violent or economically violent. Jesus spoke of all this.
What I think people needs to understand is it’s not the same to be left in the US than in Spain for example, different countries have different kinds of issues caused by different ideologies. So it’s easy to understand why someone in Germany loves worker unions but in Spain don’t because in Spain the biggest ones (UGT and CCOO) work for the government (the so called Leftist Psoe)
anarchocristianism
To me this means Dorothy Day or Tolstoy. What does it mean to you?
Same but mostly Jesus.
Come over to anarchism (libertarian socialism). Anarchy isn’t lawlessness; it’s as close as we can get to true democracy. Not this 2 party bullshit. Government AND Corporations and People shouldn’t tread on us. The government should serve the needs of the people and protect their rights from other people.
Side note, if you describe it as Anarchism and avoid saying “left”, “liberal”, or “socialism”. You might be able to reach loosely right-wing people who would otherwise turn off at any of those words.
Thing is, the economists are right about free markets being a good idea; and free markets depend on a certain kind of regulation to exist. The trouble with capitalism is that it’s never been a reliable ally of freedom of any sort; going back to the origins of capitalism in the private funding of colonial slaver monopolies. The association of capitalism with free markets is largely propaganda; capitalism started with colonial slaver monopolies like the VOC; to a first approximation every firm wants to be a monopoly, and a great way of doing that is political corruption; see today’s USA.
But there’s a reason every government since ever — from empires to democracies — has done things like standardize weights & measures, build public goods like roads to enable trade, and establish courts of law to enforce contracts and fair dealing. Those things are really good ideas! And I’m not sure I can credit the left-anarchist proposals to replace them any more than I can credit the anarcho-capitalist ones.
Mutualism sure has some nice ideas though.
Isn’t that just the (American) definition of liberal? That the market works, if restricted and guided enough by the state, so it works in the right way?
Anarchy means “without leaders”, not “without order”.
That is something so very many get wrong, either unintentionally, or because they’ve been told that lie constantly by a hierarchy hell bent on ensuring people can’t think of any other way things are done.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail appeared to have the most accurate representation of anarchy *I* have seen in modern media (that flavor wouldn’t work for a large government though). A fucking satirical comedy no one would take seriously. All other references I’ve seen about anarchy seemed like “fuck the government” was the entire ideology.
I’ve veered mostly into mutualism for awhile. Indavidualist anarchy is a sucker’s game. NOBODY can do everything alone.
Building networks and community? That’s just… what people do.
Most people do not respond to a single argument or fact. They accumulate multiple experiences. This is why the shift happens gradually for most people instead of instantly when they are confronted with facts.
I think contrapoints on YouTube 100% convinced me there is nothing strange or weird about trans people. They are just people and the way society treats them is wrong and we need to change that.
Not to say I hated trans people before but I didn’t know much about it and Natalie did a thorough job explaining in a way that was easy to understand.
I was raised Right. Change is a long series of events that no one person or interaction triggers. Dogma is only truly changed from within.
I grew up believing 9/11 was an inside job and the planes were military cargo ones with missile pods and the purpose was an auto-coup and also a heist of the gold bullion stored in the towers basement, vaccines caused autism and a range of other diseases, and I voted for Clive Palmer (Australia’s cheap dollar-store knockoff of Trump).
The turning point for me was getting off 4chan (I went via 99chan which became a nazi site before dying which is not great) , talking to more people besides just my mother and Aunt, and somehow stopping being a contrarian shitgibbon by losing the belief that all politics is irredeemably corrupt and a vote for Clive was a vote for chaos, respectively. I THINK I was looking for a world that was more interesting and made more sense than this one.
Ironically I started my internet life on &TOTSE, which is about as left as Lemmy, but there, I was an antisocial lying troll. Now I am not antisocial anymore.
I still believe that the moon is hollow and inhabited by ancient inbred families of cannibal Reptilians who aim to repopulate the earth but don’t have the means to return, but that’s fairly harmless IMO.
You’ve still got time.
I was in Geometry class when 9/11 happened. The day stopped. The news was turned on in class a few minutes before the second plane struck. I watched it in real time. I had been in those towers 6 months before too…
About the worst rabbit holes for me were giving any audience to perpetual motion trolls, and Brown’s gas nonsense in car stuff.
Everyone tries to simplify messy complexity and we are all tribal in scope. I’ve learned to only pay attention to people with academic credentials. I don’t watch translated nonsense from general news outlets. The information I pick up elsewhere is more collectivised where I expect to see a bunch of people talking about something from different angles before I view the information as relevant. I also do not care for any outlets claiming to bridge some divided narrative as these are controlling where the line in the sand is drawn. If two parties are Right and Right-Jihadists like in the USA, calling one party Left is manipulating by validating the status quo and outdated perspective.
What changed me started with stratification of rock layers and realizing deep time was not compatible with my religious narrative. I encountered a sharp personal dislike for biases and prejudice against others without logic or reason. I encountered a lot of plausible seeming arguments, but ultimately the people making those arguments had nothing to offer; they are trolls with no depth, interests, personality, community, richness in life. Look at such a person’s profile and they are not real. There is no greater engagement or value they add to the world. All they do is make arguments that muddle political narratives. I learned to view these people as either getting paid to post or idiots. I care about real people and that means your politics should only ever be a small part of your person and profile. Any person that lacks a serious passion project and hobby(s) but posts their politics is a joke to me.
In a way, I extend this to any group now. Like do people in your group include Nobel laureates that contribute significantly to the advancement of humanity. Because if they don’t, why bother wasting time with fools that lack top aspirations. Live life with no excuses. Excuses are for fools. Do the best you can with the cards you’re dealt in life.
I’ve just met more people. Friends coming out kind of forces you to re-evaluate the casual *phobia. I don’t think online can do it. You have to experience and learn yourself.
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Fair point, people are different.
Confronting them with the flaws in their thinking only makes them double down:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean-world/202401/why-do-people-double-down
If they won’t change their mind, is doubling down any different than continuing to believe what they already believe?
They actively reject the evidence and believe what they want to an even greater degree.
How is the outcome any different when the end result is them continuing to hold the same opinions contrary to evidence?
Doubling down makes them even more entrenched, then they start believing CRAZIER things.
Can’t tell if you’re talking about religion or conservatives.
Just kidding, it’s the same mental weakness being exploited in both groups.
Thanks for chiming in, Genocide Jordan.
You guys must hate it when I point this stuff out:
Before deleting most of my Reddit stuff, I had a good conversation with a conservative about climate change. They pulled out all the standard right wing talking points, and I tried to remain respectful as I provided sources that refuted every one. One they threw out that I hadn’t heard of at the time was “global wobbling,” which I had to look up. 10- minutes later, I responded, with sources, saying that it was yet another thing the right throws out to confuse the issue for voters, but something climate scientists are well aware of and can measure and predict. At that point, they thanked me for all the info and said they had some reading to do. That’s the best I’ve ever gotten. Don’t know if they changed their view, though.
I’d like to stay optimistic and hope they did as well, though if my own experience is any indicator, there’s equal chance they fell into the pit of “Maybe climate change is real, but it’s not that bad/it’s better for me.”
Ill be honest, thats a victory in itself. Creating a crack isnt a loss. Its progress. As small as it may be. A damn doesnt fail because of a meteor hitting it. Its a crack here, a fracture there. It adds up.
The resiliency of that mentality isnt impenetrable.
I’m getting there with my coworker although I wouldn’t quite call her conservative; she voted for the NDP in Canada where we live as we are both union members and that’s who we vote for, but she loves Trump, but in this crumbling hellscape of the last few months and the tariffs he’s hollering on about on Canada, she doesn’t like that because she can’t cross border shop. She says he’s gone rather loony although she still likes him.
However, she isn’t stupid, and she watches all sorts of news from all over and doesn’t just blindly believe in the cult. The last few days I have explained dark money to her, and how it fuels elections in the US for both parties and how basically the Koch brothers and all the Tanton network groups fund Trump. I gave her some articles to read, and she’s starting to get it. I didn’t put it from the perspective of hating trump, just that she should know how these things are funded for everyone (the Democrats are no stranger to dark money either and just because the groups they funnel it in under sound sunnier and less racist doesn’t make them any less sketchy), and how the political landscape is manipulated that way. I am finding she’s listening to this, and coming away with a better perspective, rather than trying to explain why he’s totally wrong. Dark money is a topic I recommend to everyone to learn about, because these elections in the US are being bought by dark money.
Don’t know if I’ve ever done it, but it was done to me.
So, it’s obviously possible.
I’m pretty amused by the mix of comments where people are offering up themselves as irrefutable evidence, while others proclaim with certainty it can’t be done. Actually a humbling perspective see people who’ve convinced themselves trying to convince others I don’t exist.
Well it can be done, IRL, and it does seem as though it can be done online as long as it’s across a time span of years and a deep well of mutual respect to lean on.
No, because nobody is actually about discussions anymore. They want to be right. I’ve sat down and talked to plenty of right wingers, after and before all this crazy shit pushed everyone into tribalism, and it was mostly that we agreed on what was good but disagreed how to get there. I miss those times. Now it doesnt seem theres any middle ground to build on.
I was very conservative. My drift leftward started before the internet was enough of a thing to have video debate spaces, but online debate has given me a lot to think about and pushed me farther left. I credit George Carlin with some of my early movement. He’s like an online debate, just against air.
My family including my parents moved from rural conservative to progressive left (probably somewhere around Social Democrat).
I’ve spent A LOT of time trying to truly reach out to conservatives, Trump supporters, from this angle. It requires a lot of time, but know two key things:
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All you can do is plant seeds for neurons to grow. Belief structures get locked in like worn paths through a jungle, and so carving new ways requires an immense amount of time. You’ll never see the fruits of your labor yourself — both because the vast majority of people have an ego they protect at all cost, and because by the time something “clicks” and new neural paths build, you’ll be long gone.
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Always recognize that your target audience is not the individual, themselves, necessarily, but the onlookers to the discussion. Always hold the high road. Always be courteous and let them throw the first punches. You’ll have a much easier task convincing the fence-sitters whose egos aren’t directly on the line as a direct participant in the conversation.
You can increase the probability you’ll reach these people by ending the conversation on a cordial note once you realize arguments are starting to become circular. You also know you made some decent ground if they just ghost the conversation or delete their entire comment chain without warning. You pierced their ego; they feel embarrassed. You’ve given them food for thought. Try to also frame how you got out of the echo-chamber so it’s not necessarily an attack on them, but an example of growth on yourself.
It’s a thankless task, the victories you’ll never see until we see it on a statistical level. The problem is that it’s a competition for who commands their attention the most, and you’ll never compete with Twitter, Fox News. You just have to hope they have that eureka moment, combined with perhaps a direct run-in with the fascism you warn about.
+1 for the onlookers. I have watched plenty of arguments myself, just trying to build an opinion. Humans work like that.
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I don’t think anyone is going to change their views over an Internet post or conversation. Maybe someone might come around on a particular topic if an argument really resonates with them, but someone changing their entire worldview can take years. But sure, I think it’s possible given enough conversation and slight nudging over time, given they aren’t being more radicalized by other content every day.
I have changed my opinions by being exposed to new knowledge and different opinions multiple times, so I assume it could happen to other people too.
I have too. I’ve been ignorant and confidently wrong occasionally.
This is why so many conservatives constantly refer to books, higher education, and bigger communities as liberal agenda indoctrination.
And then what is annoying on top of that is the conservatives who went to college and got the better life because of their degree, but then actively try to prevent others from attending college. Because everyone who attends college will get liberally brainwashed, except for themselves. They are so full of themselves they think only they were smart enough to not get brainwashed. But they think everyone else is dumb and will be brainwashed.
I’ve have conservatives tell me this. I wouldn’t call it a conversation, because they were “so smart” and I was “too dumb” that it was a talking down to, not a conversation. They had no plan to listen to anything other than the knowledge they were bestowing to a dumber person.
I was raised Christian. I was taught homosexuality was a sin. I used to angrily preach at others to convert them or they’ll burn in hell. etc. etc.
Fuck those people
That said, no, I have not succeeded in shifting anyone’s views ever. Typically the people I encounter are beyond saving unless the things happening directly impact them.
My “deprogramming,” was more a series of small hints I was on the wrong path.
At first, people who tried arguing pushed me further toward the right. They came at me from inciting angles, making up facts to support their arguments. Yeah, the left bullshits too, and if you believe everything that supports your point of view without question - you’re not that different from the people you hate.
I remember someone asking me to a Fahrenheit 9/11 showing at university, called me a Bush supporter when I wouldn’t go. I wasn’t, I just didn’t like Michael Moore. Still don’t for the above reasons.
Looking back, I could have gracefully immersed myself in other viewpoints if it weren’t for the constant needling of wannabe academics and the automatic disdain they had for my views. I was attacked for even bringing up points because I was questioning myself. Honestly, I get why conservatives hate academia.
I will say some arguments stuck, though. Statements that sounded like complete nonsense in the moment make sense to me now, years later. It’s not wasted breath to share your views with someone, they’ll remember.
Regardless, I was still wrong and it wasn’t other people’s responsibility to educate me. I did that through meeting good, patient and understanding friends, actively trying to dismantle my biases, and through therapy. Oh, and some pretty intense acid trips. That shit will fast track you to a feeling of oneness with your community real quick.
