To have a comprehensive worldview is very desirable, because then you know how everything works, but in my opinion, you won’t ever know how everything truly works until you also understand how people work, where are they coming from, and mainly, what informs and drives their decisions.
So here’s the deal, before becoming a communist, I used to be a liberal, and then also very briefly one of those alt right pseudointellectuals. As my ideological framework changed, I kept updating my worldview, and usually, I simply discarded those beliefs that I did not subscribe to anymore.
However, I still think about them sometimes, and I wish I remembered them better, because I think it would also help me understand other people who still subscribe to them. Does anyone else think about such things sometimes, and is there also some resource or can someone personally shed some light on these ideologies? Because I would certainly like to learn more about them (and remember what I forgot), about how the people who subscribe to them think about things and the world at large.
I was partly motivated to make this post by this Tumblr thread:
https://tsskyx.tumblr.com/post/711936491331436544/bemusedlybespectacled-hazeldomain
Yes it is good to be able to wear as many ideological hats as possible to better understand the world.
Our class enemies, some at least, do the same. For example the Koch Brothers have utilized Marxian thinking, but for capitalist interests.
The only way to mitigate the potential information hazard that comes with putting your message out there, is to know how other views will perseive and respond your thinking. It will keep things from being stolen and misrepresented if you can see it coming. It will also allow to speak to people in their own terms which can be a good faith approach.
I will never shy away from looking at fascist neoliberal, or “leftist”/Western woke/anarchist rabbitholes because the worst that will happen to me at this point is it will strengthen my views at the expense of exhausting me. I have been an ear to all sorts of these people IRL, I mean after all those are the two-to-three camps that basically every American falls under. I believe most people at least have a grain of truth that they recognize and it was just exploited and terribly distorted by the insanity machine.
It’s unironically easier for me to see the world thriugh a fascist lens than to see it through a liberal lens that’s how incredibly illogical liberalism is
Are you sure this isn’t because looking through the fascist lens inherently requires less sophistication?
For me it’s because fascists are the other camp who understand the basic fact that democracy and capitalism are mutually incompatible.
I like to think about other ideologies in terms of what technical informatics understands as “hardening”, that is the minimisation of your attack surface, or the union of your vulnerabilities. If you administer a computer or a network, you must stay informed about viruses, worms, and other threats, which exploits they use to attack you, and how to protect yourself against them.
Likewise, as a communist, it is your duty to understand ideologies such as liberalism or fascism to the point where you can see the world through their eyes, in order to understand how they try to get at you on a subconscious level, how minds infected by them work, and what sorts of arguments they might hit you with (A) as some person on the street and (B) when they find out you’re a communist (As you will find, these are completely different, beware especially with fascists!).
Doing this is not only necessary if you are in a position where you have to debate other ideologies it is inevitable if you want to stay a communist. Although Marxist-Leninist theory may not be vulnerable on a logical level, (A) finding the defence against arguments in practice is not always trivial, (B) you often won’t see in advance when, where and by which means idealogues attempts to target you, and ( C) both cold (broad absorption through media) and hot (anticommunists targeting you specifically) techniques of manipulation don’t even try to appeal to logic in the first place.
