my co-worker, a british woman who moved here (USA) with her husband, is a perfectly nice person. i have no problems with her, but talking to her opened my eyes to how insanely ignorant and brainwashed your average person is
she’s the definition of just a normal ass regular ass type of person. progressive but not overtly political and just kinda floating through existence. which is fine.
we were talking and she was saying all of this negative stuff about china. i of course told her my point of view which is that im very very pro china and don’t think anything she was saying was actually proven. she then went on to say maybe im right and that she doesnt get why china is bad but japan is our ally “because its the same country isnt it?” so this tells
me many normal people are walking around with negative opinions about china meanwhile they literally dont even know china isnt a part of japan.
she then went on to clarify, “wait maybe im thinking of korea. which is the bad one again?” IF YOU THINK SOMETHING IS SUPPOSEDLY BAD, SHOULDNT YOU KNOW WHAT THE BAD THING IS? how is that not a light that goes off for her and makes her consider “how tf do i think a place is bad when i literally don’t even know what place im talking about?”
i just said “well it depends on your perspective” and then changed the conversation to be about the tv show Tulsa King lmao
Sometimes we like to think we arrive at all our beliefs through reasoning, but the truth is we've come to believe most of what we believe because someone we trusted told us so. TV man says China's bad? He probably knows what he's talking about. If it reinforces something we already believe (racist conceptions of Asian people as mindless drones) then it's even easier to accept it without critically evaluating it. If it gets repeated again and again in different ways it's even easier to accept it. I think it's pretty likely that for someone who hasn't had a good reason to question everything, their reasoning skills are probably pretty atrophied and they'd rely on trusting others even more. But ultimately it's important to remember that there is no such thing as an independent thinker, and objective truth is an elusive thing that's always clouded in the subjectivities of social realities.
It's nice to have dialectical materialism as a way to be able to derive things for yourself from first principles, though. Maybe it would be good to try to explain how it works in simple terms to people like this? You know, teach a man to fish etc. etc. so they have a tool that can help them break down propaganda instead of just debunking an individual instance of it.