This is part of why my Lemmy username is what it is. It’s sort of a reaction to feeling like I need to use non-scary terms all the time — I was curious what it would feel like to wear my ideology on my sleeve, so to speak.
Below is a not very interesting anecdote about an example of someone reacting poorly to me saying I was an anarchist. It is a bit rambly because I am quite ill, and by the time I realised this, I didn’t want to waste what I had written. So here’s your disclaimer that the below story may be incoherent and deeply mundane. I’m going to get some sleep and hope I wake up feeling better, wish me luck.
The silliest example of someone reacting badly to the word “anarchism” was when I was at university during the peak of the pro-Palestine protests. We had occupied a university building, and the atmosphere at night was chill, but stimulating levels of social. A varied group meant conversation topics bounced around all sorts of stuff, many of which lined up with either stuff I know from ADHD infodiving, or because my late best friend taught me. The vibe of the conversation often became quite opinionated, but in a friendly way.
There was a dude who I argued with a bunch, and he seemed to be quite impressed by how relatively well informed I seemed on a wide variety of topics (I don’t actually know much, I just know how to shut up when I don’t know shit, and back myself when I do), so he asked me what subject I studied. He was extra impressed when I said “biochemistry”, given that that hadn’t been one of the topics of the night, so he realised that my opinions were coming from things that were side interests at best. I’m not just saying this to brag, but because one of the key parts to the story is how this guy seemed to have a quite deep respect for me based on the breadth of my knowledge and how I’d argued my opinions that differed from his.
I hadn’t used the word “anarchism” to describe my beliefs, but for once, it wasn’t because I was hiding it — the vibe was so political that it was fairly safe to assume everyone there was likely either an anarchist or a communist or something variant thereof (on the backside of the big whiteboard in the occupied lecture theatre, there was a tally chart recording how many anarchists there were Vs communists. This really tickled me because that’s what rivalry between our peoples should look like — acknowledging the differences in perspective between the “factions”, while recognising we were all there because our goals were the same, which is why the “rivalry” was joked about).
Anyway, when I used the big, scary A-word, this guy’s demeanor completely changed. I have never seen such a rapid drop in respect for a person, much less been on the other side of it. He had asked me about what I would envision as a solution to some problem or other, and I summarised the view, and said “so, Anarchism basically”. He had a ridiculously erroneous notion of what anarchism was (he seemed to sincerely believe that anarchists would oppose buildings, because they’re a structure), but he was so set in his viewpoint that literally anything I said from that point was inherently laughable. This probably isn’t a very interesting story, but it will always stick out to me in a cautionary tale kind of way. I’d been talking to this guy all night (which started when I noticed someone seeming a bit uncomfortable with the extent to which he did devil’s advocate style discussion. I joined the conversation initially to deflect him from that person, but ended up relishing the challenge of keeping this abrasive, but seemingly good-faith guy on his feet).
TL;DR: people’s biases are wild. Someone can agree with you all night, and then suddenly that all changes in one word. Sometimes people feel threatened by the big scary words, and sometimes they find you literally laughable. I thought I was prepared for bad reactions, but I wasn’t prepared for the latter kind of bad reaction. It was very surreal at the time.
I’m meant to be going to sleep, but I remembered a time when I saw someone use the scary words in a masterfully executed piece of rhetoric.
She acted like she agreed with the word vomit of red-scare propaganda that was coming out of this dude’s mouth, but redirected the topic to how companies like Walmart have effectively lobbied for socialism, but only for them. This confused him and set him off guard, especially because he had coded her as someone who believes “socialism bad” and so had his guard relatively low already.
She explained that because Walmart pays their employees so low that many of them are reliant on social security benefits, this meant that Walmart was effectively receiving taxpayer subsidies from the government. She seeded the idea that part of why there’s so much red-scare propaganda is because the capitalist class want us rallying against socialism, but she framed it like “companies like Walmart are being deceptive because they perpetuate anti-socialist messaging to detract that they are the main beneficiaries of socialism”. She said it much better though.
It helps that the dude already had pretty strong views in favour of the state doing stuff to look after its people, but had just drank the koolaid about the terms. She facilitated him refining his views on that matter until he was vehemently arguing in favour of socialist policies to all his mates in the pub — he just didn’t know that was what he was arguing. She even managed to link up those views to the anti-corporate angle, so that when he was talking about Walmart being a beneficiary of socialism, it didn’t sound like he was being anti-socialist.
I remember watching in awe of how gracefully she manoeuvred through the conversation. The subtle manipulation she deployed was so skillful that I even wondered whether this was unethical. I concluded it wasn’t though, because ultimately she hadn’t got him saying anything he didn’t already believe. I low-key wish I had a recording of that conversation, because I felt like I learned a lot about how to do guerilla class consciousness building.
Okay, bed time now — for realsies.