[ExI] retrainability of plebeians

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 11:37 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> In Eastern Europe for decades the people were fed propaganda and
> locked up (or worse) if they dissented; and still they saw that they
> were worse off than their neighbours and threw out the communists. Are
> you saying that the anti-capitalist propaganda and other impediments
> to political and economic change are even worse in modern democracies
> that in the Soviet Union?

### Yes. Soviets were crude and brutal which detracted from their
ability to sustain belief, and of course whenever people were allowed
to visit a capitalist country, all the conditioning and propaganda
tended to evaporate in confrontation with reality. US government and
its propaganda outlets such as schools, universities, and media
outfits staffed by alumni of state-funded schools are much more
subtle. They feed into common human biases - the authoritarian bias,
envy, make-work bias, anti-foreign bias, anti-market bias. It makes it
easier to discredit freedom and convince the public that the
oppressors are the solution rather than the disease, and of course you
can't travel somewhere and see a capitalist society to get a
comparison.

Rafal