Liberals have found an interesting rationalization that allows reconciling support for free speech with the need to censor ideas outside that threaten liberal ideology.
The trick is to claim that the total sum of valid ideas falls within the liberal ideology. All the ideas that are contrary are therefore fundamentally invalid, and thus can be treated simply as noise.
This is why liberals love the fake news and disinformation narrative so much. In their mind, they’re not censoring valid ideas that are contrary to their own ideology, but are rather fighting against noise that has no fundamental value. Since these aren’t valid ideas to begin with, liberals don’t see censoring them as a form of censorship.
I think a big part of it is liberals believe they are intelligent, free thinkers who can sift the truth from the lies. Trouble is, they are not given the tools to do so, and liberalism is ingrained in people from the moment we first learn to talk, so it comes as such a natural thing to them that questioning the liberal outlook would be like questioning the existence of the sun to them. It’s just a thing that is there, a permanent fixture of life.
So they believe they are determining the “facts” correctly, but they don’t even consider that the framework they use to examine the facts is flawed and doesn’t always give correct results. It just “is.” and by extension, everyone uses the same framework, because it is the only framework that exists. So when they see someone who arrives at radically different conclusions to themselves on an issue, they have two options in their mind:
1: I was using the framework wrong.
2: They were using the framework wrong.
So when they look at people like QAnon, this is an easy answer, as they also use the liberal framework, but clearly have “gotten things wrong.” so to your standard lib, they can point that out no problem, as QAnon is easy to debunk. And in the event of a situation where they are wrong, but within the framework of liberalism, they can have no problem admitting that (some do, but plenty of “skeptics” and that tend to be willing to change their minds on things within this framework.)
But when they encounter someone outside the framework, like a communist, they just don’t understand. We don’t fit into either of their two boxes, because we aren’t using the same liberal framework to analyse the world. So they awkwardly try to fit us into the “Using the framework wrong.” box, but we obviously don’t fit into it neatly enough. Worse still, things that liberalism says are “impossible to predict” or “impossible to prevent.” are both predictable and preventable within a socialist framework. Things like recessions happen like clockwork under capitalism, but the liberal response to this is to shrug and say “no one knows how they happen.” So when we predict a recession, or a socialist country doesn’t suffer from one, it causes the liberal a lot of discomfort. We’re supposed to be using the framework wrong, yet here we are, understanding an event better than they do.
So their only option is to insist we are “lying” or “fake news” somehow. When liberalism brushes up against reality, they have to choose liberalism or reality. Most will just plug their ears and force themselves to watch Marvel movies, Clockwork Orange style until they forget all about it, but some realise the system they’ve taken as a gospel truth their whole lives isn’t actually a good framework for understanding the world, and they might like to look for better ones. (Unfortunately, a lot of them fall for fascism at this point, because it offers the same easy answers as liberalism, but pretends to not be liberalism. So it is familiar and comforting to them.)
Jeez, take a shot every time I said “framework” goddamn.
On a related note, I’ve also noticed that we basically have a Darwinian competition between different world models. Different groups of people subscribe to a particular explanation of how the world works, and that becomes their ideology. Some people go through this process consciously, but vast majority just internalize the world view from people around them as they grow up.
What’s interesting is that once somebody settles on a particular world view then it’s natural for them to reject conflicting views since there’s no way to prove whether one view or the other is correct in most cases. And I tend to think of this in terms of thermodynamics where people have complex graphs of ideas in their heads, and when any particular idea is challenged then the whole set of ideas associated with it has to be reworked as well. It’s easier to simply discard conflicting ideas than to go through the process of rethinking a bunch of things you’ve internalized over many years. This is why it’s typically very hard to change people’s ideas no matter how good your argument is. The cost of integrating this new information is just too high to bother in most cases.
What typically causes people to go through this process is when they start seeing the drift between their world model and the material reality they experience. When mainstream liberals start experiencing a continued decline in their material conditions then it becomes difficult to continue believing that everything is getting better and that they’re living their best lives under the most enlightened system possible.
Hence why a lot of people started questioning things after 2008 crash, and as economic disasters continue, we see more and more people falling out of the liberal mainstream. Unfortunately, as you rightly point out, many of these people end up on the right because the right ideology is very close to liberal ideology, so it’s much easier for people to internalize those ideas.
Excellent analysis. My partner started out extremely liberal but by wedging a crowbar into their cognitive dissonance every time liberalism conflicted with reality in their life I’ve managed to drag them leftward.
This is a good technique for anyone!
This is great I love this. It also shows why the western left has such vast issues, because most of them carry over pieces of that framework into whatever other ideology they choose. The framework still exists, they’ve just moved the furniture.
This doesn’t make any sense to me. Are you basing it on some work of Marxist theory?
