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   Vitrine Litanies (intransitivelie@c.im)'s status on Thursday, 31-Aug-2023 08:31:38 JST Vitrine Litanies

   Once again, ignorance is not the reason for fascism, and you can't educate your way out of a situation which you didn't get into by ignorance.

   Believe me, fascists know exactly what they're doing, and they often know history quite well. You can't inform them. They already know.

   Education has its importance, particularly in reaching those who aren't yet convinced, but you can't convince a bigot or a fascist to give up their path through reason. They don't care about hypocrisy either.

   And saying, "People wouldn't be bad if they were better educated," is both incorrect and egotistical. There are plenty of well-educated evil people, and by positioning education as the divider, you imply that your side is smarter and therefore better.

   Education, specifically public, public-funded, and liberal (from a classic not a political standpoint) education is also valuable because it gives children the opportunity to meet other people. It gets them out of insular family groupings. That's why fascists want to control education. Not because a poorly-educated populace is inherently less moral, but because they want to isolate children and indoctrinate them.

   Some of this stuff is arguable. The conclusion isn't. You can't educate your way out of a fascism. It is necessary but insufficient.

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     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ (anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social)'s status on Thursday, 31-Aug-2023 08:37:38 JST novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     @intransitivelie it's Hume's classic is-ought gap. No amount of facts and information will convince someone else of a moral or evaluative stance that they don't already share the basic foundational beliefs or values of. That's why there are many incredibly well educated fascists such as the Dark Enlightenment Neo-Reactionary movement — they are well aware of the same information as us, but they have different desires ans values and so come to different conclusions (although I do think they are simply factually incorrect on many matters as well). Moral beliefs and values must be justified at least partially in terms of antecedent moral beliefs or values, because you simply can't derive them from facts alone — there is nothing logically incoherent about not caring about some facts someone else cares about and things is relevant or viewing something positively to others view negatively or vice versa. But this means that eventually if you go back far enough in someone's chains of justification for their moral beliefs and values you have to come to moral beliefs and values that are simply not justified by anything unless you end up in an infinite regress, which wouldn't motivate anyone to care about anything. And those moral beliefs and values that are held without justification as the basic foundations of what someone believes and cares about are formed by passions and emotions and past experiences. So that's where you have to hit someone with different moral beliefs than you in order to change their minds because all of our fundamental moral beliefs and values are based on these things and so you have to convince everyone on the basis of those things by changing the emotions they feel about things.