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this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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I'm in a small leftwing party in Portugal whose roots go back to the fight against dictatorship which was mostly done by Communists, and when Russia invaded Ukraine I had to come up with a framing to help some of the older members understand it since they were instinctively siding with Russia (I basically just compared it with the invasion of Iraq by the US and reminded them how they felt about it).
People back 50 or 60 years ago were just indoctrinated into Communism as young people (understandably in a country which was under a Fascist dictatorship which included censorship) and still today in their mind space they have lots of "undeniable truths" which they accepted long ago without any critical thinking and which they never really examined, and specifically in my country were "Communism" was mainly the Soviet Union variant, a lot of those "truths" are about how great Russia is.
Mind you, this being a party other than the local Communist Party, and thus were even the older Communists were people who were not in the actual Communist Party because they disagreed with them (so a thinking kind of Communist rather than mindless tribalists), I did manage to turn around the few who had instinctively sided with Russia. The local Communist Party, even now (after that country turned into basically Fascism) are still pro-Russia.
I bet this kind of inflexibility of people is how the world could end.
Well, the funny bit is that those old guys were still flexible enough to change their minds when a suitable framing of the thing was presented to them, by which point they recognized it all as the more generic scenario of "aggressor attacking victim to take their shit" and made their opinions based on what their principles were on that kind of thing.
I would say the problem here was tribalism: they were predisposed to believe, support and excuse the aggressor because they felt, due to long ago experiences and indoctrination that "they're our people". Fortunatelly these specific people were open minded and intelligent enough to be able to step out of that and consider the whole thing from a detached point of view.
Plenty of tribalists are pretty much religious fanatics when it comes to all those "acquired truths" and the truthfulness, trustworthiness and wisdom of whatever the tribe's leaders say.
IMHO, tribalist is by far the greatest problem, though I would agree that it and inflexibility are deeply connected.