I’m dumbstruck as to what to do. The US is building literal concentration camps, and none of my co-workers care at all.
In fairness, I work in healthcare with an almost exclusively cishet white population who are financially well off.
Many of them espouse to be Christians, and no one cares at all that the American government is following the exact playbook from Nazi Germany.
What do you do? How do you make people care before it’s too late?
Something I’ve had to accept over the course of my life is that the vast majority of humans will passively accept anything as long as they feel like there’s something they can do to not be killed. Only when it feels out of control whether they might be killed will the majority of people feel the need to act and no sooner. There has never been any changing this. Fortunately the vast majority of people are not needed to affect positive change. People who care need to set the tone and followers will follow as they do. Your efforts would be better served among people actively resisting or building structures that benefit people.
I sometimes wonder is Trump does a lot of crazy sounding shit to make people who speak against him sound insane.
Don’t waste your energy on people who won’t listen.
Look for people, places and groups that support your own beliefs.
If you can’t find those people at work, then just be nice to them but not too close. Them in your free time, use your energy to support those people and groups you believe in.
Don’t waste your time on those who won’t listen.
Look for the helpers.
What do you do when those people are your family?
Easier said than done (though recent events have made it a little easier).
Not impossible, look into cult deprogramming. My mother a few years back had a media diet of Steven Crowder and talking heads alike. She has very different views now. Her social life has improved, she dissects political news and generally became a more stable person.
Do you want people to care or do you want to lecture people who don’t agree with you. People like to give lectures on politics, but no one listens to them. If you want people to care you have to care about them.
Bingo. This is the fundamental disconnect I encounter on a daily basis. All anyone wants to do is lecture me about how they are right, and I am wrong if I think different than them. And if you don’t give into them they simply start insulting or shaming you, hoping they can emotionally abuse you into compliance with their beliefs. Or they just think you are evil and divide the world up into hyperbolic terms.
That isn’t how you learn or win people over to your side. All it does is promote ignorance & alienation, and that’s what we have an overabundance of in our current society.
I’m apparently old-fashioned/out of date, but I went to college to learn how to understand, assess, and communicate with other people… seems like that is no longer what people are taught or at least, no longer value it.
It’s less about valuing communication and more about the dopamine hit. Delivering that lecture and educating the simpletons feels really good.
Yep. Anger and egotism are proven my studies to basically be like taking a hit of cocaine. It gets people off and they get addicted to it.
Lemmy is my cocaine.
All anyone wants to do is lecture me about how they are right, and I am wrong if I think different than them
The only relevant question is - are you wrong?
Is your take actually valid? Based on sound imperical data? Is not fallacious? Does your reasoning stand up to scrutiny? Is it fact, or a belief? Is it a justified belief?
Ultimately you shouldn’t need to be coddled if you have any allegiance to the truth.
It’s one thing if a 3-year old gets 2+2 wrong. It’s another when it’s a 33 year old. Would you waste energy on that, or would you assume that the 33-year old doesn’t care enough to bother no matter what approach is used?
The unfortunate reality is that democracy as a vehicle for progress is a failure because not enough people have an allegiance to the truth, nor have the basic epistemological tools for determining what’s knowledge, what’s belief, what’s a hypothesis, what’s theory or what’s valid evidence or any idea of what the scientific method even is, or what an axiom is etc.
They favour their delusions (I don’t mean religion specifically) over truth.
Truth doesn’t feel good. People want to feel good.
Psychologically it’s not different than biology in the sense that people don’t want to work out and eat healthy… they want to be lazy and eat energy dense food.
Yes but like exercise, intellectual exercise feels good too. The question is why do some people not do it.
Idk I listen to politics lectures all the time, most of which I don’t fully agree with, many I disagree with outright, listening to other takes, especially opposing ones helps me scrutinize my own reasoning and critically analyze what’s what.
It’s not really the lecturer’s fault he was lecturing, if he was right and so he should be lecturing others on truth. Much like any subject really.
This idea that all opinions are equal are how we ended up in a post-truth world.
Thought-terminating clichés of “everyone likes different things” or “people believe different things” are not just signs of a lazy intellect, they are the harbingers of our doom.
You can have beliefs that aren’t facts, in fact - you have to, but you can’t just believe whatever, you need to be able to justify it, and to do that you need to understand logic, you need to understand evidence, you need to understand the scientific method and how to reason.
There a big difference in seeking something out and someone walking up to you and talking at you.
Yeah, but what do you do when a good chunk of the population doesn’t go ‘seeking something out’, yet vote and influence the lives of those who do anyway?
Try making friends first, or at least understanding them. If you aren’t willing or capable of doing that you are just going to make things worse.
Huh? Did you respond to the wrong user?I’m not OP, I don’t go out talking at people at work.
All of my friends are already pretty much on the same page more or less, it’d be hard to be friends with someone who is against human rights or doesn’t care about such things as I’m a minority.
The question i posed in my comment was about a societal scale: what do you do to reach a disengaged electorate or an electorate that has no desire to know the truth and is not actively seeking it out whatsoever, instead believing things that re completely transparently false.
Because as it stands, the current strategy of content online or in traditional media simply ends up preaching to the choir, the lectures containing truth end up reaching only those who seek them out and as such already have an allegiance to the truth and likely at least to some extent agree with them, or see them as epistemologically well justified beliefs imperically and/or logically.
I personally rather obviously can’t make friends of like 50% of the population of a country for instance, so it’s not really a workable solution lol and I don’t think that’s what you meant.
So how do you show those people who believe transparently false things because it suits them the truth and teach them to want to seek out truth and want to believe the truth and to spot falsehoods and not be swayed by rhem, when those people have absolutely no interest in such things?
And if you can’t, what do you do then? Because these people will literally destroy a democratic society if given the chance.
Especially at work, where you can’t leave and should probably be focusing on the work.
That’s 100% true and a fault in OP’s attempt, but the broader question remains, if some people don’t seek it out, what do you do then?
As someone who admittedly is guilty of “lecturing,” many do enjoy it and have DM’d me or replied thanking me for it. Different people respond better to different approaches, be they the walls of text I am frequently guilty of or shorter questions trying to get them to elaborate on their own understanding.
Actually, I don’t remember if I ever thanked you for your work; We don’t always agree on everything but your positions are thought-provoking, your delivery respectful, and your patience seemingly infinite. So, thank you. I wish there were more people like you on the left.
Thank you so much for the kind words! Genuinely. Many will slander me a troll or whatnot, but it’s words like yours and the others that say similar that keeps that patience going. I mean it.
As someone in a similar environment, there are others who care. It just isn’t worth the risk to my job & professional relationships to talk about. Most people who don’t care I won’t sway anyways and anyone who does care doesn’t need to talk to me. So, for the betterment of my family, I stay quiet at work. Outside of work though I’ll talk to my friends & anyone who will listen about the risks of the current regime.
What would you like for them to do? Have they discussed how they vote with you? Or how they spend their money? Maybe they just don’t want to talk about it at work?
I spend a good amount of energy trying to explain the merits of Marxism-Leninism and Leftism in general on Lemmy (and IRL, though that’s much trickier). Ultimately, you can’t make someone care. You can’t convince people of something they choose not to want to believe, either, no matter how much evidence you throw at them. Roderic Day wrote a great article titled Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing” that perfectly encapsulates this process. People license themselves to believe whatever it is that they believe benefits themselves, regardless of evidence or empathy.
What you can do, however, is explain the merits of that which you believe in, and this is far more effective with people already targeted by the current system. Those closest to the edge, those radicalized by their conditions but not yet organized or versed in theory, are the perfect people to talk to. The effort required to gain an ally in that sense is far less than someone who is convinced that the system is fine, but just needs a little tweaking. Building strength through organization helps legitimize your positions and expands the circle, so to speak, by moving the “line of radicalization” further. Person A, who believes the system is fine but needs tweaks, goes from comfortably mainstream into the new line of radicalization, one step away from working to supplant the system, when those who were radicalized near them organize.
Further still, as conditions deteriorate, more people are impacted and more people are radicalized. This is both good and bad, bad in the sense that more are affected by the evils in society to a greater degree, but with the good being further chance of organization.
Just my 2 cents as someone who has spoken with many different people about Marxism.
Thank you.
No problem!
How do you make people care before it’s too late?
none of my co-workers care
You can’t force another to care. We can educate them with facts and reason while trusting them to make their own choices. And, that isn’t done in a workplace, instead one on one in presence of a human relationship.
But, if you insist, then there’s always a way. Read the Bible as part of a Bible study to develop a nuanced understanding of its message. Relate that message to social democrat, socialist, communist, and anarchist ideology. Determine the relevant Bible passages useful in the specific situations you encounter with specific Christians, then memorize those passages. Then, in full context of Bible and situation, in the moment, quote the passage. Finally, shut up and wait.
To add to this, be sure to wait for the immediate pushback. Stay calm, and understand that this will be a slow burner. Kindness and repeated contacts to the change minds more than one off aggressive arguments.
People have a difficult time changing their points of view, and some people can feel lots of psychological pain during that process.
People won’t care until negative things start effecting them. Even at that point, many will still deny negative things are happening or they will put the blame somewhere else. This is why I believe things are going to have to get bad, really bad, before they can turn around. The biggest thing to go bad would be the economy. An economy so bad would be hard to deny and live with. Unfortunately, the more money you have, the longer you can “deal with” a bad economy, and still think everything is okay.
That is a particular subset. There are people who see nothing g bad happening to themselves, but do have their eyes open and see the bad things happening around them. But, again, they are ready and primed.
It is much the same as addiction counseling: until people are primed to change, there is little to do but leave your hand out stretched, not pushing any further than that.
If you are trying to make them care or discuss it at work then that is where you are failing.
Very few people want to or are willing to discuss politics at work. Many will report it as harassing behavior and you run the risk of getting fired.
You need to talk to them outside of work.
This is correct. Leave this shit out of work. I agree with OP but I don’t want to talk about religion or politics at work.
exclusively cishet white population
Red State? Then don’t bother, nobody would care.
Look up the specific area around your workplace and trump’s margin of victory, and you’ll see just how fucked it is.
Preaching in a red area is a waste of time, I’m telling ya.
Edit: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/us/elections/2024-election-map-precinct-results.html
I think this works. Look it up.
Edit 2: Oh wow, my Precinct is more than +50 Harris. Go Philly! I’m glad to know that if a nazi is walking around doing the salute, they getting them ass beat.
Edit 3: HOLY FUCKING SHIT. I looked up my old place in NYC, and wtf a RED WAVE. +20 felon, +30 felon change from 2020. Jesus Fucking Christ. Glad I’m outta that hell.
NYC is so cooked, especially Brooklyn.
Counterpoint, I grew up in a smallish town in Idaho and was still absolutely surrounded by Democrats. State wide, only sixty percent of the voting age population actually turned out, and of those one out of every three people voted against Trump.
Hell, Democrats outnumbered Republicans in some countries and again, this is fucking Idaho.
This means that if you talk to an a Idahoan at random, there is a more than fifty percent chance they either largely already agree with you, or they are largely insulated from and not paying attention to politics and thusly susceptible to being swayed with the right approach and concrete examples of what Trumps doing to fuck them and their friends over specifically.
Left wing ideas and policy are still far more popular among the general public, which is why Republicans have to lie about them constantly.
Look for your local anarchist bookstore, look at what your counties Democrats actually organized, especially things like local pride events, show up, and network/make friends.
As is fun to note, there are more Democrats living in Texas than New York state, so the idea you should just give up on finding any around you because you live in a red state instead of one where the numbers are reversed is honestly rather absurd.
I wish I knew. People keep telling me to “organize” and “strike”. Like yeah a Walmart full of 60yo conservative white people is going to strike over this, fucking idiot.
Lecturing others anonymously online isn’t exactly caring either.
I’m not lecturing, I’m asking for help on how to approach this. This is closer to frustrated bitching than lecturing.
