Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing”
redsails.org
I’ve become very skeptical of the concept of “brainwashing.” Over the past few months this skepticism has boiled over into open and explicit disagreement with even well-meaning pushers within the Marxist-Leninist corner. I often find it difficult to explain concisely why it is…

So I’ve heard of a previous post from which reminded me of this article from Red Sails…

So far, only a few people have mentioned Red Sails in that previous post, though with a different, but relevant article, but none have mentioned there its most famous article “Masses, Elites, and Rebels”

(Note: this has been posted a bunch of times on this community, you better read it, it’s a short one)

I will let a few excerpts speak for themselves

“Brainwashing” as a political theory breaks society down into three mutually-exclusive camps: 1) a group of elite manipulators, 2) vast masses under their control, 3) a rebellious group of enlightened critics (to which the person launching the accusation of “brainwashing” implicitly always belongs, since they are neither unaware of it nor abetting it). An unstated premise of this political theory is that what determines which of these camps any individual belongs to is a mixture of intellectual enlightenment and moral purity.

{…}

I am going to argue that this narrative is nonsense. It tries to pass off as universal and eternal something that in reality is particular and ephemeral. In short: Westerners aren’t helpless innocents whose minds are injected with atrocity propaganda, science fiction-style; they’re generally smug bourgeois proletarians who intelligently seek out as much racist propaganda as they can get their hands on.

{…}

The prevailing populist narrative grants the People (of the West) moral innocence by attributing to them utter stupidity and naivety; I invert the equation and demand a Marxist narrative instead: Westerners are willingly complicit in crimes because they instinctively and correctly understand that they benefit as a class (as a global bourgeois proletariat) from the exploitation enabled by their military and their propaganda — organs of coercion and consent. [6] We’re not as stupid as we’re made out to be. This means that we can be reasoned with, that there is a way out.

Admittedly I am smuglord about this…

But pls, make this a primer on the side bar of this comm, many ppl need to see this

  • queermunist she/herEnglish
    17•2 months ago

    if you, for whatever reason (marginalized member in a school system completely hostile to your marginalized identity), put less faith in the school system relative to your peers, you’re probably going to either completely check out mentally or be more skeptical of what gets taught there.

    You’re contradicting yourself. Here you’re saying that people who don’t believe the anti-communist bullshit are lead to that conclusion by their material conditions, but you already said that material conditions have nothing to do with whether people fall for propaganda or not.

    Our material conditions directly shape how vulnerable we are to propaganda and indoctrination (i.e. formal education). When their bullshit contradicted my actual lived experiences, I started looking for other answers. It’s not because I’m smartTM, but it is because my family was poor and my dad was disabled from a workplace injury and I didn’t fit into my assigned gender role etc etc my material conditions.

    Speaking of books like A People’s History!

    I highly recommend checking out Lies My Teacher Told Me to get a sense for the level of indoctrination we’re talking about in school curriculums and textbooks. The scope of the propaganda mission is deep and vast, from Native American genocide to labor struggle to women’s rights to Black liberation, everything taught to students has been carefully shaped to fool children into believing bullshit lies about the US.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]English
      11•2 months ago

      You’re contradicting yourself. Here you’re saying that people who don’t believe the anti-communist bullshit are lead to that conclusion by their material conditions, but you already said that material conditions have nothing to do with whether people fall for propaganda or not.

      No, I said “probably.” There’s plenty of people coming from marginalized communities who completely internalize the views of their oppressors. This is where the phenomenon of the self-hating minority comes from. As I stated earlier, an ideological crack forms, but it’s still on the person to actually investigate the crack itself.

      Our material conditions directly shape how vulnerable we are to propaganda and indoctrination (i.e. formal education). When their bullshit contradicted my actual lived experiences, I started looking for other answers. It’s not because I’m smartTM, but it is because my family was poor and my dad was disabled from a workplace injury and I didn’t fit into my assigned gender role etc etc my material conditions.

      Material conditions is insufficient. If material conditions were the only thing that mattered, then there’s pretty much no point of propaganda. Or the propaganda is basically a “how the sausage is made” lecture on how the current economic order which necessitates kids in the Congo mining cobalt or Bangladeshi women crammed in sweatshops is how people in the imperial core can afford cheap electronics and clothes. The propaganda would be nothing more than a realpolitiks lecture on how Gazans have to be ethnically cleansed by the IOF so the Zionist entity can continue to destabilize WANA on behalf of the US, meaning that the petrodollar continues to reign supreme and the US can compete with BRICS+ and its geopolitical rival China. This might work for the ghouls at /r/neoliberal or Destiny’s discord, but this won’t work for normal people.

      If material conditions were the dominant factor, then pretty much everyone in the imperial core would be equally brainwashed, with people in the US maybe a little bit less brainwashed due to lower standards of living (lower life expectancy, shittier infrastructure, trash tier health care system, no public transportation). But observed reality paints a very different picture where people in the US simultaneously have shittier living standards and are more brainwashed than people within the imperial core or even other Anglo countries.

      I would never subscribe a single reason for an extremely complicated social phenomenon, but I stand by my original comment. People vastly underestimate formal education where people are explicitly taught the ruling ideology and explicitly punished if they step out of line.