This is liberal arrogance. Don’t worry, most of us educated in the Western system were brought up this way. It took me years to get through mine.

The answer is: be humble, your trust is not necessary for you to learn about materialism, you have no place worrying about USING it yet when haven’t even spent the requisite time learning about it.

An ananolgy might be an undergraduate dismissing linguistics after a primer on Wittgenstein. They never read a full text of Wittgenstein, they never read the debate between and among linguists, and they never struggled to understand what was actually being said. They just used their naiive undergrad vibes to be like " that sounds dumb" and ignored it for years, or forever.

You don’t have the privilege of us trying to convince you because you haven’t bothered to spend the time reading and learning enough to even make a meaningful post on the topic.

Don’t worry about whether or not you trust it. Go in humbly, learn, evaluate it, get deep, keep questioning it, read the debates. Don’t ask for vibes to counter your vibes.

No investigation, no right to speak.

Do you think your thoughts shape the world around you? Not your perception of the world, but the world itself. Do you see people as disconnected individuals who choose to create and destroy relations between them as they see fit? Do you believe that a hungry, oppressed mob can be placated by words and ideas?

Or, do you think your thoughts are shaped by the world around you? Do you see everyone as connected (whether they recognise it or not) and influencing each other? Do you believe that a hungry, oppressed mob can’t be placated by words and ideas, only food and the end of oppression?

I guess I’m looking for a stronger foundation for materialism.

You mean other then the material reality you occupy and that you can change using your physically body?

Maybe it would be easier to explain things to you if you told us what your understanding of materialism and idealism is. The two are actually opposites and can in no way coexist. Well, they can “coexist” as well as oil and water can be mixed together.

You might try Georges Politzer’s Elementary Principles of Philosophy.

I can highly recommend this introduction to diamat. It’s a very accessible and explanation of what dialectical materialism is and why it’s the opposite of idealism https://dashthered.medium.com/marxism-for-normal-people-dialectical-materialism-deb5034685a4

I’m interested in the essay you were reading if you have the link.

I think at this time you’re too early into it to form a definitive conclusion. This will come later but essentially we know materialism is correct over idealism because we can disprove idealism with materialism but idealism cannot disprove materialism with its own tools. Hence the answer to the fundamental problem of philosophy, which is whether materialism or idealism is correct, shows that it is materialism that is correct.

But it helps to strengthen the things one learns to challenge them and think of ways in which the premise could be proven wrong. So I think the first question would be in which ways do you think materialism and idealism can be used side by side?

The view that idealism and materialism are or could be compatible is idealism. You can’t see that if you don’t investigate materialism. All you will have before then is an idealist framework, through which everything will and must look like it supports or can support idealism.

Idealism =/= ideas

Ideas can be a material force, can e.g. motivate workers to organise a mass protest or revolution. Our the architect first has an idea for a house and then this idea, coupled with very material labour and resources can be brought into existence. But there’s absolutely zero possibility of the architect’s plans coming to fruition just because she has thought them up.

Having a mere idea does not make it real. For example, thinking that idealism and materialism are compatible has no effect whatsoever on their compatibility.

Or why couldn’t you posit that all is the ideals of some greater thing, appearing as material to us?

Because this is not a materialist argument. It is pure idealism. It is the kind of faux materialism of religion, which today cannot avoid acknowledging that the material world exists but insists that an ideal God must still be behind it all.

Space and time are not affected by what you or anyone else thinks of them. Idealism suggests that they are or could be so affected. Materialism insists that they are not.

If you’re interested in space and time, maybe read Lefebvre and Harvey first, then come back to materialism. And remember that it’s not just materialism, it’s materialism plus dialectics. Without dialectics, you will be led astray as to what materialism means.

You know you’re not saying anything new. People have been having this debate for centuries. I recommend Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism for understanding why the two schools can’t mix this way.

Your proposition that everything could be just a projection from god’s mind is a rehashing of George Berkeley’s position. He was an ardant idealist who hated materialists, and he thought that the only reason things still exist when you stop perceiving them is that god is keeping them there. Where does god exist if this is all a projection?

Rene Descartes (also Christian) thought that there was some ideal realm where souls lived and they were somehow freely controlling human bodies in the material realm. That’s an absurd idea because how can things interact if they are not part of the same world.

There is the kantian and humean idea that we can never know beyond idealism because we are subjectively observing things and cannot know the “thing in itself.” They have the logic there, and it’s definitely true that we can only know relative truth from a materialist perspective (recommend the Ego Tunnel on this topic).

Still, the Marxists are most compelling that it doesn’t matter what elaborate ideas we think up if they do not correspond to how things are in practice. Functionally there is socially informed objective reality and reliable sensations. If this were not the case then how can people make computers and such? Why can’t someone invent things based on their own contradictory physics? Are experiences on drugs or while asleep equally real as everything else? Surely there are rules embedded in the world we inhabit. Whatever someone thinks doesn’t matter unless it corresponds to practice.

Anyway, read theory and think critically about it before you come up with your own silly theories.

Might be that terminology is throwing you off? I’d recommend Mao’s On Contradiction: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm

In particular, note how he frames it here:

The metaphysical or vulgar evolutionist world outlook sees things as isolated, static and one-sided. It regards all things in the universe, their forms and their species, as eternally isolated from one another and immutable. Such change as there is can only be an increase or decrease in quantity or a change of place. Moreover, the cause of such an increase or decrease or change of place is not inside things but outside them, that is, the motive force is external. Metaphysicians hold that all the different kinds of things in the universe and all their characteristics have been the same ever since they first came into being. All subsequent changes have simply been increases or decreases in quantity. They contend that a thing can only keep on repeating itself as the same kind of thing and cannot change into anything different. In their opinion, capitalist exploitation, capitalist competition, the individualist ideology of capitalist society, and so on, can all be found in ancient slave society, or even in primitive society, and will exist for ever unchanged. They ascribe the causes of social development to factors external to society, such as geography and climate. They search in an over-simplified way outside a thing for the causes of its development, and they deny the theory of materialist dialectics which holds that development arises from the contradictions inside a thing. Consequently they can explain neither the qualitative diversity of things, nor the phenomenon of one quality changing into another. In Europe, this mode of thinking existed as mechanical materialism in the 17th and 18th centuries and as vulgar evolutionism at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. In China, there was the metaphysical thinking exemplified in the saying “Heaven changeth not, likewise the Tao changeth not”, [4] and it was supported by the decadent feudal ruling classes for a long time. Mechanical materialism and vulgar evolutionism, which were imported from Europe in the last hundred years, are supported by the bourgeoisie.

As opposed to the metaphysical world outlook, the world outlook of materialist dialectics holds that in order to understand the development of a thing we should study it internally and in its relations with other things; in other words, the development of things should be seen as their internal and necessary self-movement, while each thing in its movement is interrelated with and interacts on the things around it. The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictoriness within a thing is the fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations and interactions with other things are secondary causes. Thus materialist dialectics effectively combats the theory of external causes, or of an external motive force, advanced by metaphysical mechanical materialism and vulgar evolutionism. It is evident that purely external causes can only give rise to mechanical motion, that is, to changes in scale or quantity, but cannot explain why things differ qualitatively in thousands of ways and why one thing changes into another. As a matter of fact, even mechanical motion under external force occurs through the internal contradictoriness of things. Simple growth in plants and animals, their quantitative development, is likewise chiefly the result of their internal contradictions. Similarly, social development is due chiefly not to external but to internal causes. Countries with almost the same geographical and climatic conditions display great diversity and unevenness in their development. Moreover, great social changes may take place in one and the same country although its geography and climate remain unchanged. Imperialist Russia changed into the socialist Soviet Union, and feudal Japan, which had locked its doors against the world, changed into imperialist Japan, although no change occurred in the geography and climate of either country.

Changes do take place in the geography and climate of the earth as a whole and in every part of it, but they are insignificant when compared with changes in society; geographical and climatic changes manifest themselves in terms of tens of thousands of years, while social changes manifest themselves in thousands, hundreds or tens of years, and even in a few years or months in times of revolution. According to materialist dialectics, changes in nature are due chiefly to the development of the internal contradictions in nature. Changes in society are due chiefly to the development of the internal contradictions in society, that is, the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, the contradiction between classes and the contradiction between the old and the new; it is the development of these contradictions that pushes society forward and gives the impetus for the supersession of the old society by the new. Does materialist dialectics exclude external causes? Not at all. It holds that external causes are the condition of change and internal causes are the basis of change, and that external causes become operative through internal causes. In a suitable temperature an egg changes into a chicken, but no temperature can change a stone into a chicken, because each has a different basis.

This dialectical world outlook teaches us primarily how to observe and analyse the movement of opposites in different things and, on the basis of such analysis, to indicate the methods for resolving contradictions. It is therefore most important for us to understand the law of contradiction in things in a concrete way.

My rough understanding of it is that idealism posits things as “mind over matter” to put it one way. Whereas dialectical materialism would include both mind and matter in a constant interplay, the internal and external, which then also extends beyond a single person or organism to a whole society, for example.

I want to thank everybody for their suggestions (and especially for their suggested readings). I’ve built up a small curriculum based on those recommendations, I’ll study that and post again here (with more knowledge) afterwards: either my own explanation of “why not both” or with more questions.

These are the recommended readings, I’ve put them into what I imagine is a reasonable order.

• https://dashthered.medium.com/marxism-for-normal-people-dialectical-materialism-deb5034685a4
• Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism
• Mao, On Practice
• Mao, On Contradiction
• Lefebvre and Harvey The Production of Space
• Georges Politzer’s Elementary Principles of Philosophy.