Keep an eye out for opportunities to show them how their struggles in life are tied into the political order they live within. And if it’s hard to do that, try to understand the political order better first, so you can more communicate about those connections.

It’s relatively easy in the US, for example, to point out that the healthcare system is awful and “that issue you’re dealing with relating to your health would probably be less of one with a better system”. But for some people, they are going to have a view of capitalist realism here or they are going to think “so what? if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride”. So you may have to get more specific about what exactly is wrong with the system in specifics, why it’s possible it could be better in actionable terms.

Then there is stuff where it’s trickier to draw connections, even though the connections are undeniably there. For example, someone who is struggling in dating. Patriarchal socializing and system and the resulting dynamic along with the pushes against it have contributed to making things more fraught, fearful, and tenuous. As well as how the capitalist order pushes individualization and atomization. Trust is low, women have lots of real reason to be fearful and to just prefer independence if that’s that vs. risking being with a controlling man. Women are taught to expect someone who can only speak one emotion flavor: anger/outrage, and to devalue their own emotions. Men are taught to only express anger/outrage and see the rest as weakness. There is all kinds of stuff like this you can get into because the political order is the social order is the economic order is the everyday life. They are inextricably interconnected. And in a meta way, recognizing this in itself as a fact may be necessary to shake some people out of the malaise, so that they stop viewing highly conditional systems in a particular country in a particular period in time as historical inevitabilities of the human species.

Too often online I encounter a sentiment like “X is human nature,” “people are tribal”, “this is how things have always been.” It’s simply not true and there’s no getting around the fact that if you want to get through to those particular people, you have to somehow get past their false beliefs about history and humanity. Which you don’t necessarily have to argue with directly. Showing them how things are intertwined right now in their life may naturally help them see how contextual a political order.

Edit: wording

I’m sort of at a loss at this point, so let me backtrack a bit. This is your original post:

When someone says “organize” without further elaboration or context regarding what they actually mean, they are saying: “I am either so immensely lazy that I refuse to give even the most basic directions to a receptive audience or else I’m a poser who doesn’t know what they’re talking about”

I approached this in my replies from a couple of different angles at first: 1) Opposition to individualism and the value of it. 2) The implication of ignorance and/or laziness and challenging that portrayal of others.

I’m willing to emphasize and admit I could have zeroed in on the 2nd one with more clarity and awareness in my initial reply, which I think is what bothered me most. But rhetorically, I was trying to challenge what read to me like binary thinking and projecting intent onto what may just be ineffective communication. Something which, ironically (or fittingly?) may be happening with us two here.

Like, have you talked to people who just say “organize”? Did you investigate and discover that they are posers or didn’t want to bother to elaborate? Or is that an assumption you’re making about why they’re doing it? How do we get to the point of fixing that problem if we don’t even know why people are doing it? I shouldn’t have tried to excuse it as much as I did. I’m willing to agree it is a problem of a kind. But I don’t think passing judgment on entire swaths of people without evidence is going to fix anything.

That’s fair. I don’t pretend it is “scientific.” Where I’ve seen value in it, in practice, is as a framework (like a lens through which to think about thinking), not an empirical description of reality. I’m just not sure if the potential benefit outweighs the harm it can cause. Now I’m reflecting on it more, the notion of tension in the psyche between the dominant and inferior function might be the most salvageable part of the theory, on the fact that it’s looking at contradiction and tension between opposites that is never fully resolved. Not unlike dialectics, in spirit, even if the rest of it is a bit iffy. I could maybe see value in examining the psyche as tension between contradictions, where instead of viewing the “cognitive functions” as static preferences that stay dominant and inferior throughout life, there are primary contradictions and secondary contradictions that can shift and change as you develop as a person. This is closer to one alternative take on the theory, which views the cognitive functions more as something you flow between rather than as static preferences.

But in practice, it would still probably be more useful to ground such a view of contradictions in the details of a person’s life and upbringing and so on, rather than through a generic lens of preferences like Intuition or Sensing.

It took another poster a sentence to describe some substantive meanings of organizing in a communist context; what you’ve failed to say once in post after post of self indulgent ranting. Get your mind out of the cycle of elitism and dunking, and take this seriously.

That’s reasonable to me. “Objective Personality System”, a derivative of it that is intended to be more scientific, is the closest I’m aware of to going beyond that. And as far as I know, they have yet to actually publish their findings in any meaningful capacity that others can study and reproduce, so it’s sort of down to trusting they are doing any kind of research diligence.

Ok, but what context is that sentence in? If you said “get involved with a group of activists even if you need to make the group yourself” to a neo-nazi, you aren’t really helping the communist cause, are you. You aren’t with saying “organize” either, of course. But the point I’m trying to make is against overgeneralizing the context of what these things are being said in order to be dismissive about how people are presenting them and the knowledge they are implied to possess as a result.

I resisted saying it at first cause I didn’t want it to come across as a snarky gotcha, but it seems relevant at this stage of our back and forth to point out that in your original post of dismissal, you did not in fact elaborate on what organizing means yourself. And within the back and forth so far, the furthest you have gotten is “get involved with a group of activists even if you need to make the group yourself.” Which has no inherent anti-imperialist, working class, or communist connotation within it.

Yeah, MBTI is a topic I could probably get into at great length. Spent a lot of time in it on and off over the years. I think a lot of its problem is that people see the surface level MBTI categorization, especially as pushed on them in workplaces and the like, and justifiably think it’s an annoying oversimplification. But I’ve also seen quite a lot of sincere effort into digging deep into psychology and using theories relating to Psychological Types and MBTI as a means of understanding each other better and being more accepting of cognitive differences. Then again, I’ve also seen people who use it for obsessing over how they are better than others, or uniquely unique and special, or becoming so enmeshed in viewing the world through an MBTI lens that they lose sight of more complex dynamics beyond it. So it can go a number of ways.

There are platforms (like twitter) where every word counts. And the TL;DR thing on the internet is real. I don’t think you can blanketly say that elaborating is always easy and therefore it’s always ignorance if someone does not give the full spiel.

So I do not have the clarity I can summarize him on my own. I recall some iffy stuff with his views on the Nazis, here is one source I could find on it though I’m not sure if this page has the full text: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-5922.12072

The article shows how strongly anti-Nazi Jung’s views were in relation to events during World War II such as Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, the fall of France, the bombings of Britain, the U.S. entry into the War, and Allied troops advancing into Germany. Schoenl and Peck, ‘An Answer to the Question: Was Jung, for a Time, a “Nazi Sympathizer” or Not?’ (2012) demonstrated how his views of Nazi Germany changed from 1933 to March 1936. The present article shows how his views evolved from 1936 to the War’s end in 1945.

If you need whole stuff written on you to explain your views on Nazis, that’s probably not a great sign.

Then there’s also stuff he wrote on psychology. From what I’ve seen, he’s most known by association for his Psychological Types, which is what MBTI was derived from. But he also wrote some other lesser known stuff on psychology.

Eh, I’d say it is a point worth making to some people even in vague terms. When you’re dealing with people who have been socialized to view everything through an individualist lens of “do your own thing and it will somehow change the world among enough people doing their own thing,” the emphasis alone of arguing for organization can mean something.

It’s part of the cycle of blame. Liberals can’t take responsibility for failing cause that’d mean they have to actually do something more than whine about what the rightists are doing; they would have to both obtain power and leverage the organized violence of that power in order to suppress any and all rightist influence. But they don’t and in practice, often ally with and enable them instead. That leaves them blaming the nebulous, shifting, ill-defined entity “the left”. An entity which is portrayed as both weak and strong; on the one hand, “the left” is viewed by liberals as an inconsequential sample of the population and thus something that should be ignored when it comes time to legislate or court votes. On the other hand, “the left” is viewed by liberals as a serious threat that undermines their ability to win elections by refusing to support them and carrying water for what they label rightist talking points, such as (at this point, with the vote blue no matter who nonsense) criticizing anything a liberal in charge is doing.

If they took responsibility, they would have to admit that the liberal order they idealize is impossible to manage or sustain or implement meaningfully much at all without the contradictions building over time rather than lessening. They would have to admit that where they stand isn’t in any kind of middle, but is in direct opposition to the marginalized, the colonized, the working class. And the best they can ever do as liberals is the political worldview equivalent of Scrooge voluntarily becoming a good guy in A Christmas Carol. They can’t take it further than charity unless they take power seriously and for them to take power seriously, they either end up aligning with the rightists or they figure out they’ve got to reject liberalism and embrace a dialectical liberation as laid out by communists.

I don’t know. I can tell you, seeing what the game industry did to video games certainly helped me adopt an anti-capitalist lens. It was influences significantly beyond that though, that got me all the way to communism.

I mean, the game industry killed most of my passion for video games in a death by a thousand cuts. But that didn’t on its own get me in front of people who were talking anti-imperialism, talking Lenin, George Jackson, Michael Parenti.

racism, against black people

Recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nxeiFpSJfc

It’s a bit anecdotal as evidence goes, to be fair, and I recommend watching it, not taking my summary of it at face value, but the general idea IIRC is: black people are more treated as a curiosity. Like being curious about someone of an ethnicity you have never seen before, who looks so different. But since China doesn’t have the racialized cultural context that the white supremacist west has, it’s not an aggressive or hateful curiosity.

There’s this mythos in western thinking that goes something like, “Racism is cause people are tribal and mistrusting of strangers.” But it’s missing how systemically racism gets developed over time in history and for what purpose(s). And China, as far as I can tell, has no reason for such a development of power in relation to black people, so they simply don’t have the racism that the west has.

As tempting as it is sometimes, doomerism is counter revolutionary. Not to be confused with being down sometimes or contending with depression. Taking a stance, even if meant in jest (and doomerism does go for dark humor sometimes) that suggests there is no hope is a problem. That’s not even getting into the problems with feeding narratives about exaggerated differences between generations, which is a divide and conquer thing, and doesn’t help us build solidarity with anyone.

There are observable differences between generations in culture and conditions they face, to a certain extent, but exaggerated statements about them that suggest helplessness or a fixed, doomed state of being is not a good idea. And the liberation cause is one where people have more in common, usually, than they have differences.

I highly recommend Mao’s essay On Contradiction: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm

I’ve been trying to revisit it more than once until it crystallizes in application. I can try to give an example of how I apply what I think is roughly dialectical thinking beyond purely basic class stuff. It’s something I thought through a while ago, but I’ve never formally written down my reasoning and observations, so bear with me.

In text generation AI, I encountered a problem. I’m making a long story short, but I found there were companies, one in particular that I experienced directly, who provided an AI-powered chat service to help people with emotional support and loneliness (that was in part how it was advertised and scripted). However, this service also pulled the rug on people at some point and caused a lot of damage.

This drove me to ultimately seek out and support a lesser known (at least at the time) AI service that was staunch on user privacy (using encryption to accomplish it) and being uncensored text (you can write anything in private with it). Within this, I had to contend with the fact that I am not someone who blanketly goes “free speech”; I am not someone who thinks people should just be able to do whatever no matter the circumstances. I also had to contend with the fact that I am not a blanket supporter of AI, considering its implications for messing with the jobs of working class people. Even more complicated, this was (still is) an AI service that also allows image generation (though that aspect of it is not something where you can generate anything - you can’t generate “lifelike” due to how the model is trained) and image generation arguably poses more of a threat to jobs than text generation, since it creates an image start to finish without needing an artist in the process at all. Furthermore, this was the main source of funding for that company (they don’t take money from outside investors).

But, this was also the only AI service taking seriously the consequences of dealing with emotionally vulnerable people who are saying private and sensitive things to an AI. In order to side with these people and side with them having a harm reduction place to cope with the loneliness and abandonment capitalist life has inflicted on so many, I am also siding in some part with the development of AI and the proliferation of it and consequences intersecting with it and capitalism devaluation of labor, even if I try to have conscious limits on how I partake in that and in what way.

So, my “support” of AI in this understanding is conditional and developing, based on how it intersects with what regular people are dealing with and the consequences it has, helpful or unhelpful. It also contains a certain amount of contradiction, in the sense that I am arguably allying with people I’d rather not be, to an extent, in order to reduce harm for the time being and support development of AI in a direction that is genuinely safer (not “safer” in the corporate PR meaning). I am not capitulating on caring about regular people in the process, but I am having to choose where I put my energies in the direction of substantively helping them. I don’t pretend it is a challenge or threat to the capitalist order, something like this, but it is something where I tried to really go through it and work out what was the best course of action while keeping the ideological core intact. There was/is, as far as I could discern, no “right answer” in a binary meaning of it. Instead, I was trying to work out where in the contradictions of it made the most sense to take action to enact my intent to side with regular people and what form that action would take.

I am not very confident on the subject and practice of dialectical materialism, so please don’t take this as a model of it. But hopefully it can provide some food for thought, if nothing else.

Good god. That is… a lot to deal with.

Great point and healthy reminder that the practice part in theory and practice is critical to get anywhere.

I have some experience with modding and game making - not paid company work type of stuff, but studied it in college, have made (small) games on my own or with others and have done extensive modding in one game that got a fair bit of attention.

I agree with cf saying it depends somewhat on the game. But also, overall modding is likely going to be easier for a number of reasons:

1. Scope. Modding forces you to work within heavy constraints due to being unable to directly edit the game engine, source code, etc. For creative control, this is a drawback, but when you’re just trying to get something, anything made, it’s a help. It means what could be an overwhelming pool of possibility and a vision gone out of control becomes more akin to, “Okay, let’s see if I can change the color of this house.” In other words, it forces you to approach tasks as a smaller set of steps and in so doing, makes it easier to make some kind of progress at all, rather than none.

2. Framework. Modding a game means there’s already an existing framework there, a game that functions relatively well, presumably has a decent gameplay loop, etc. So you don’t have to worry about, “Am I making something that will be utterly boring/unappealing/etc.” because there’s still the underlying game beneath it. So it’s a lot harder to spend time on something that isn’t enjoyable at all. And it means you have existing game design to mimic. In the game I heavily modded, some of the stuff I did was effectively repurposing features that were already there to use them slightly differently. I was still being creative and doing my own ideas, but much of the actual work of it was already done.

Does this mean modding will always be easier than making your own game? Not necessarily. For example, you could make a simple console-based (like command prompt, not game console) grid game with C++ that uses ASCII characters to simulate where stuff is and a player moving from a starting point to a goal. Something I’ve done before. But, will this fulfill your desire to enact a creative vision? Probably not. The more you have to learn to get started, the harder it’s going to be to get to the creative part and that seems to be the part people usually crave as an entry point.

Hope that makes sense!

And some of us live in the US, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world, is built on genocide of the indigenous (still an ongoing problem), slavery (prison labor loophole still exists), and is currently funding and supporting a genocide against the Palestinian people. You can repeat the word cosplay as many times as you want, it doesn’t suddenly make your world real and others not.

My point about you “living in anecdote” is you’re playing the internet trope “I was X and I understand it better than you” card, and so far, as far as I can tell, you have yet to even name what this mystery country is, in spite of being directly asked by someone. Meanwhile, you’re pushing garden variety “vote blue no matter who” talking points and showing repeated ignorance of what kind of person Biden is comparative to Trump and what the US is actually like.

You are not “way to the left of Biden” in actual substance. You are enabling of genocide by framing one of two runners of it as lesser evil. You call others cosplayers, but it’s you who is treating the claiming of a political label purely as a badge you put on yourself rather than something that has to be backed up by, you know, actually aligning with it.

Trump was already in office for 4 years though. It’s not some big mystery how he would act as president. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The nature of US fascism is not identical to every other country, but you’re just ignoring history if you think it has never seriously opposed communism internally. Like, COINTELPRO for starters? Come on.

It just comes across to me like you’re inventing this arbitrary goalpost for fascism, so that you can say the US isn’t at it yet and then say vote for the other guy. With a helping of vague “I lived under anecdote” to go with it. Like what is with this language of calling people cosplayers? Where exactly do you think US citizens live, not in the US?

I’m genuinely confused as to what your politics are supposed to be.