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How do people in this day in age become nazis/neonazies sexist or even incels when there is so much knowledge against it? Do they get anything out of being that way?
Access to knowledge doesn’t imply successful absorption of said knowledge. And a lot of the thing isn’t about knowledge, but moral premises - things that are neither true nor false, but that you consider good or bad, and as others said here emotions and self-interest play a huge role on the later.
Yea but isn’t knowledge a tool for understanding good or bad. If something someone tells me is bad or whatever I go and look it up read about it so I can have a discussion with them and understand their point of view. Am I wrong in doing so?
Not quite - knowledge alone is not enough to label something as good or bad. Because good/bad aren’t attributes of that thing, they’re only your attitude towards it.
That’s important here because it’s perfectly possible that a bigot knows that what other bigots use to justify their bigotry (like frenology etc.) is false, but still says “nah, screw them, I’m defending my own group at their expense”. And that person would be still a bigot and should be treated as one.
“When dealing with people, and remember that you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion. Bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.”
– Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
They are being constantly bombarded with algorithm-fueled targeted media designed to make them feel just good enough about themselves to keep watching the next video of ‘woke woman gets owned on camera and everybody claps’. Source: my childhood friend gets recommended this trash daily on his youtube homepage. I try to push against it without re-enforcing the narrative that The Liberals are the reason why he doesn’t have any friends. I don’t think it’s working.
Remember that racial segregation in the US wasn’t that long ago, historically speaking.
Some of children who lived through that era were raised with racism and these values were passed to their children who became Gen X and Y.
Religion also had a bigger influence in the previous generations. Homophobia and transphobia was normalized and you could even be arrested for being any of LGBTQ up until very recently and it’s still the case in some regions.
Nazi ideology never really left either. And the way this ideology came to be was through disenfranchised people who were angry and needed someone to be angry against. Someone came at the right place at the right time and gave these people a scapegoat.
Fascism is kind of the same but with a cult of personality.
Racism and bigotry aren’t logical positions, but emotional ones. People have an emotional need to be part of a group and feel included. If the group a person joins is antagonistic towards other groups then the person will internalize that and become bigoted. The dislike of other groups becomes a part of their identity and belonging.
The documentary Behind The Curve illustrates this pretty effectively. They follow some flat eathers around and interview them and they all say the same thing. They love being a part of the group. They didn’t have a group before and now they do. Their beliefs keep the group together and they’re not going to get rid of them just because the beliefs can be proven to be wrong.
The desire to be a part of a group is strong enough that people will believe anything as long as it gets them some friends. There isn’t anything wrong with that unless the beliefs of the group are harmful and hateful.
I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.
C’mon man! That’s conspiracy thinking if I ever heard it. The truth is far simpler, and worse, people are people just being people. And there are a lot of people trying to navigate a wildly complex world we didn’t evolve for, one that’s changing at breakneck speed. We almost have to boil our experiences down into more digestible chunks to make sense of it.
This article is so old that the formatting’s been trashed, but I think you can parse the order of the text with a little effort. Few things I’ve ever read gave me a wider view of the world. It was so important to me I saved a PDF a few years back. If you don’t like the humor, fuck it, there’s still a strong message.
You’ll find a lot of arguments for believing such things if you look for them. Some of these arguments are simply angry rants (and they appeal to angry people who aren’t inclined to think analytically) but others are quite sophisticated. Have I refuted all the sophisticated ones I’ve come across? No, that would take a lot of effort, and maybe some of them are even technically true. I’m not convinced by them primarily because I have certain assumptions about the world: conspiracy theories are generally not true, most people just want to live a good life, kindness is usually reciprocated, and so forth. Someone who holds the opposite set of assumptions (every organization is corrupt, many people are inherently evil, kindness leads to being exploited, etc.) won’t be convinced by your “knowledge against it” without even hearing you out in the same way that I’m not convinced by the arguments for it.
There’s a lot of information, there’s also a lot of misinformation. Many people don’t trust authorities, sometimes for understandable reasons, so they end up in the fringes.
Also, the Nazis, and even the Confederates, weren’t all that long ago in the grand scheme. A couple generations. Many people learn these tendencies from their family.
Also incels are somewhat different from Nazis/fascists. There’s obviously a lot of overlap. There’s always been men who had trouble with women, but I think being a male virgin after a certain age is enormously more vilified these days than it was in, for instance, the 50s, even among more progressive, left leaning groups. Admittedly, that’s anecdotal so I could be wrong.
Part of it is education and critical thinking. People don’t know what to trust because they don’t know how to test information for truthfulness and can’t reliably fact check. So they depend on an authority figure to tell them what and how to think, with expected results.
Note this isn’t limited to these people; some people just pick better authority figures than others.
Additionally to what has already been mentioned: People are susceptible to politics that confirm their prejudices. Right-wing political thought is largely based on confirming that whatever prejudices people hold, they are morally good and justified. Thus elevating an in-group above out-groups. That is a powerful lure.
If you remember the post trump election memes about economic anxiety being mediaspeak for racism, this is basically where that came from.
Bigotry is a despair response, when the promises of normalcy fail someone, there’s a chance for them to start looking for new meaning to understand a seemingly indifferent world, and in that state of mind, being told you’re part of an exclusive club of inherent superiority is the ego stroke that gets them off.
From the moment they take that poison pill it basically plays out as an analogue of addiction. Even as they watch the sludge they’re mainlining destroy everything around them it doesn’t cut them off from, they just can’t stop, because the validation of feeling that it’s the entire world that’s wrong instead of just you being shit out of luck is too much for a lot of folks to be willing to part with.
It also doesn’t help that these people tend to get fired from jobs that don’t put up with racist bullshit, turning the whole validation needing into a vicious cycle sort of deal.
This is also why some very stupid self described leftists seem to have zero worry about the rise of fascism (even as they insist that they’re the only ones who truly take it seriously as a threat), they think “just do a socialism bro” will instantly fix everything as if economic hardship would never happen to a socialist society even within a vacuum.
They literally think you can just pay the racists to stop being racists, and that you can pay a heroin addict to stop shooting up.
This is also why some very stupid self described leftists seem to have zero worry about the rise of fascism (even as they insist that they’re the only ones who truly take it seriously as a threat), they think “just do a socialism bro” will instantly fix everything as if economic hardship would never happen to a socialist society even within a vacuum.
I have to admit - I’m having a hard time picturing how this would be expressed. Any particular examples you can point to?
All the “don’t vote” leftists that think democrats not voting Bernie is less forgiveable that the Republicans closing abortion clinics and kicking gay kids out onto the streets.
They think perceived direct opposition to socialism is worse than something they believe will just magically go away once they finish bribing the racists to not be racist.
Emotions are stronger then intellect, much stronger. And most of these people suffered in bad childhoods and were drilled or neglected into disempathy. (That’s not the necessary reaction to such childhoods but it’s a common reaction.)