My mind keeps thinking back to a brief exchange I had with my mother about a year ago. It was sometime in the late fall/early winter of 2020 and my mom was watching some local news channel that was showing a segment on the state of pre trial detention in the U.S., and my mom turned to me and said something along the lines of "That's terrible! Did you know that some people are spending over a year in jails just waiting for their trial?"
(I don't remember the exact words said in this exchange but I remember the jist of it)
"Mom, you know I spent the entire summer yelling at cops. What makes you think that I didn't know about the terrible things they do?"
"Well, this doesn't have to do with cops because this is just the justice system not taking care of these people's cases fast enough"
Now normally I try and educate my mother about the bullshit in the world but that answer was so blatantly intentionally ignorant that I was just fucking speechless. It took me a couple seconds of complete bewilderment before I could ask the very, very obvious follow up question of "WHO DO YOU THINK PUTS PEOPLE IN JAIL???"
At that point my mom just threw up her hands and just gave up. I'm pretty sure she even realized that what she said was completely absurd. But I keep going back to this exchange in my head because it's such an eye opening view into the liberal mind
Anyone else have any good stories like that?
"It's impossible for Afghanistan to have a democracy because their literacy rate is so low."
Like, yeah that's an obstacle, but do you think that the literacy rate in the 18th century was super high? If you build your democratic system with that in mind it doesn't have to be an issue, what's far more important is building a system that has buy in from both rural and urban populations, instead of just trying to force a system onto them from the top down (the results of trying to do that were made pretty clear earlier this year).
Later on in this conversation I tried to explain that not being literate doesn't mean you can't be smart, it just means you didn't get taught how to read. This guy was a Staff NCO in the Marine Corps and I'm pretty sure he was just reaching for anything and everything he could say to dehumanize the Afghanistan population to justify the war being fought there.
Real talk though I think the practice of using written law pre mass literacy was one of the barriers to actual democracy and lead to the authoritarianism we see in the US and even the failure of the Chinese republic.
Oral democracy ala the Soviets and Syndicate governments that emerge during general strikes, or even Iroquois concensus democracy make more sense for non literate populations. Like, there's a reason Allende designed the economic planning infrastructure to be operable by an illiterate person.