250 sats \ 3 replies \ @Brunswick 19 Oct 2023 \ on: Orange Pilling Your Lefty Friends bitcoin
I believe I have decoded the lefty's mind. A few days ago I realized why they seem impenetrable when you present them with facts, figures and incentives.
Here is my hypothesis why:
The leftist believes in an ideology. This is obvious. But what is the ideology?
The basis for the ideology is social justice. Yes, I know this sounds cliche, but give it another thought;
- Q: What does it mean to be for social justice?
- A: To be for social justice is to prefer feelings of empathy and community over self-interest.
When an orange-pilled and red-pilled corn hodler presents bitcoin to the leftist, they present all of the aspects the leftist sees as repulsive. Even though the leftist will live in the lap of luxury dining on fine wines, cheeses, beers, sweet meats, they do it eschewing money and wealth.
The orange pilled will react to this behavior as hypocritical and contradictory, but this is the source of the leftist's guilt. To point it out to them only serves to throw them into cognitive dissonance, and this is no way to make friends. This is the fault line of the political divide. The leftist resents the non-leftist for embracing self-interest and political policies that embrace individual responsibility.
To get to the core of the matter;
- The leftist has a belief system that if we all hold to certain values such as egalitarianism and fairness, with government policy (of course), it will eventually overcome the evils of greed and unbounded wealth and everyone will eventually be free of oppressive imbalances of power.
Therefore, to present them with facts to the contrary is only to reinforce their belief system. They only see your inconvenient evidence that proves their ideology counterproductive as a temporary obstacle that will eventually fade away as their utopic vision finally overcomes the present darkness imposed by the evil industrialist.
What say you, does this provide any value to the conversation?
Yes. I agree. Expressing bitcoin as a tool of "social justice" seemed to work in my case. When talking about this when @k00b made his post I also mentioned Satoshi's Genesis block referring to England bailing out the banks, and the ideological kinship with Occupy Wall Street. Attacking banks is an effective common ground also, IMO.
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To them, banks represent capitalism (without distinguishing between the crony and the free market varieties), to us they represent statism / cronyism. So maybe cronyism in general is the largest common denominator to attack.
I always thought of myself as being against leftism, but then I read that agorist is left-wing libertarian, because Konkin made this important distinction between cronyism and free market capitalism, and due to perhaps confusing terminology, considered himself anti-capitalist, meaning anti-cronyist.
The hardest part may be to convince the leftist that regulation serves cronyism under the pretense of protecting the people.
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You said a lot there. I find it infuriating when I get the glib response from leftists along the lines of "well, we tried the free market, and look where it got us", as if the U.S. had embraced free market capitalism.
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