the_dunk_tank

You have a few days to read his before I get embarrassed about writing a wall of text.

most human beings are just animals — scared, stupid, and impulsive

Most of us think and act as our circumstances demand. We believe what those around us believe, because we lack the energy, time, resources, and education to build a worldview from the ground up. Even here on hexbear, we absorb consensus views from our peers rather than each of us individually verifying every detail. We trust the collective intelligence, media literacy, skepticism, and good will of our community, and we trust our process of consensus.

The way propaganda works is by hijacking the consensus. Capitalists control the major mouthpieces of our society - the media and the politicians, and increasingly, the social media. They run astroturf campaigns. They launder false stories through legitimate media outlets. They tell you Saddam has WMDs and Gaddafi is conducting a genocide, and they drum it up into a consensus. Soon all your friends, family, and coworkers believe it too. When they're not lying, or lying by omission, they propagandize by emphasis, by choice of words, by slant. They shape what is permissible to think and say. Propaganda works, and it works on everyone, including you and I. Cultural attitudes about gas-guzzling vehicles were largely manufactured by the oil industry and its media cronies. Those attitudes did not arise organically. Propaganda experts hijacked the consensus and changed the culture.

nothing disenfranchised about those shitbags driving $70k pickup trucks eating meat at every meal

As individual consumers, we can only do so much. We can't vote with our wallets to change the power grid, transportation infrastructure, manufacturing, or commercial supply lines. There are some individual choices we can make, but they would need to be coordinated on a mass scale, and even then the impact would be limited. Sooner or later, change must come from government, and as the 2014 statistical analysis I cited showed, we do not control our government. The public has "little or no independent influence" on public policy. Whenever we disagree with capitalists on an issue, we lose. Sometimes capitalists use their stranglehold on the media to gin up public consensus, other times, as with healthcare in the US, they don't even bother, because they don't have to. Policy is written by money and power and leverage, not by votes. It doesn't even align that well with public sentiment.

The other issue is coordination. Putting the onus of change on the individual is like expecting wildebeests to cross the river one at a time. Individuals don't make change, coordinated movements make change. The issue there is that capitalist states are experts at crushing or co-opting movements. Huge volumes of propaganda, astroturfing, even jailing or assassinating movement leaders, like the six BLM leaders who died in Ferguson under suspicious circumstances in the years after the George Floyd protests. The situation is infinitely worse outside the imperial core, where entire governments can be toppled, nations invaded, and populations starved by sanctions. Capitalists have violently killed millions of people who tried to bring about collective change, including worker's rights, rights for women and minorities, education, healthcare, and environmentalism.

Even modest gains, like the 8 hour work week, and the ostensible right to unionize, have required significant struggle and risk, and since then decades of Cold War propaganda have eroded the class consciousness and solidarity that made that organizing possible.

“Would you be willing to stop eating cows to save the rainforest?” 2% might answer yes.

If you controlled the media and the government the way capitalists do now, I bet in ten years you could persuade the public to reduce red meat consumption at least by half.

Maybe not you, literally, but say a democratic socialist government. Do things for people, meaningfully improve their lives, and they'll start to listen.