What do you do when people don't care?
What do you do when people don't care?
I'm dumbstruck as to what to do. The US is building literal concentration camps, and none of my co-workers care at all.
In fairness, I work in healthcare with an almost exclusively cishet white population who are financially well off.
Many of them espouse to be Christians, and no one cares at all that the American government is following the exact playbook from Nazi Germany.
What do you do? How do you make people care before it's too late?
I've never done something on the scale I'm describing, so this is mostly just speculation, but I hope it could be useful.
First of all, find the people who do care. Talk with them. Make a local antifascist group in a secure messenger (Matrix/XMPP, or at the very least Signal), or join an existing org that you disagree with the least (don't be afraid of the word "socialist" if you stumble upon them). Do not discuss anything illegal, as it could spell trouble for everyone - you live in an (increasingly) authoritarian country with a wide range of tools to repress you. Keeping it legal at least makes it less likely.
Now that you have a support network, you can start reaching out. Until/unless your organization gains serious traction, unite over common goals instead of squabbling over your differences. DO NOT guilt anyone for being financially well off, voting for the wrong candidate, believing in stupid things, etc. Find people who are somewhat unhappy or unsure about concentration camps. Try convincing them that concentration camps are bad - it probably would be easier if they are on the fence already or if they are being unjustly treated themselves. Show compassion. Do not be condescending or use the words that may trigger them (Nazism, etc), instead appeal to humanity and empathy to specific people who are being repressed. Bring some examples of unjust repression with you. Do not overdo it - you don't (yet) have to agree on anything except that these concentration camps are bad. Propose to do something together - it can be small at first, like calling your representative or organizing a picket - common action builds connections and mutual understanding.
Have you ever wondered how people reacted to the original Nazis in the 1930s? Well... now you know. If can feel proud of something, it is at least I am extremely against it and the whole 'what would you have done?' is basically answered definitively for me.
You don't.
A large swath of Americans have made it clear they don't care to pay attention and won't care until it personally affects them.
So we're simply going to have to watch our nation decline until the majority of Americans have personally been affected. Then we'll begin a long, difficult path to gaining back what we lost, just to get back to where we were before the decline happened. Then we'll be happy to be back in the same shitty situation we were before and probably let things slide back into a decline again.
Americans are stupid. And there's nothing you can do to change that.
If the concentration camps were started during the Obama administration and (nobody cared), then were operated during the first Trump admin and (the only caring-concern was performative) then they continued to operate under the Biden admin (while still nobody cared) then why would people suddenly start caring now?
BTW I'm referring to the immigrant concentration camps near the border. What ones are you referring to?
I sometimes wonder is Trump does a lot of crazy sounding shit to make people who speak against him sound insane.
I had a conversation with my second grade teacher on Instagram the other day. I posted Matthew 25:35-40 on my story with the comment “I can’t believe so many Christians I know support a president and a government that would willingly and forcefully kick Jesus himself out of the country thousands of times.”
She replied saying that this verse doesn’t apply for the same reason that I don’t allow just anyone into my house: because there are people who shouldn’t be there. There’s just so many things wrong with her logic AND her premises that I barely knew where to start, and that’s part of the problem. Fascism works by sowing doubt in the fabric of credibility. All she really knows is that her idea of Jesus comforts her, and so finding comfort somewhere probably means she can find Jesus and righteousness there too. You can’t really teach someone to care because they probably already do care, but you have to teach them to see the things that are actually happening, to trust the real experts, and to see the connections between themselves and the people who need care.
Something I've had to accept over the course of my life is that the vast majority of humans will passively accept anything as long as they feel like there's something they can do to not be killed. Only when it feels out of control whether they might be killed will the majority of people feel the need to act and no sooner. There has never been any changing this. Fortunately the vast majority of people are not needed to affect positive change. People who care need to set the tone and followers will follow as they do. Your efforts would be better served among people actively resisting or building structures that benefit people.
Perhaps you can find inspiration from Daryl Davis, who convinced 200 Klansmen to give up their robes.
To help you find an answer i'll return you the same question: why did you not care about US building concentration camps and following the fascist playbook until now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictment_and_arrest_of_Julian_Assange
My (great)-grandparents were part of the Dutch resistance during WW2. Along with a full 1.5% of the population.
Most people will not do anything, even if they are literally rounding up people for a genocide.
On the more positive side, a lot of people will support the resistance in small ways.
The number of people who actually, whole heartedly collaborated with the Nazi's was quite small.
Even some of the German soldiers stationed in their village would turn a blind eye. Some of them realized they were on the wrong side and they just did the bare minimum of what they needed to do to not get in trouble and not get killed.
Not everything works out in life.
You could start by engaging and reaching out. For example, assuming someone doesn't care because of their race, gender identity and job is kinda shitty. Maybe look into those internal biases.
The next part would be finding out how they are and will be effected by this new presidency. Sometimes people have a hard time caring about a problem if it doesn't affect them directly. You might have to get to know your coworkers rather than make assumptions about them to learn this.
Being polite and nice to them also helps, no one wants to hear from someone who's screaming at them.
I had some very similar feelings after the 2020 election cycle and COVID stuff. This VSauce video came out around the same time and, unironically I guess, helped convince me of some stuff I'd started to realize with regards to changing people's minds. https://youtu.be/_ArVh3Cj9rw
Don't waste your energy on people who won't listen.
Look for people, places and groups that support your own beliefs.
If you can't find those people at work, then just be nice to them but not too close. Them in your free time, use your energy to support those people and groups you believe in.
Don't waste your time on those who won't listen.
You can stop using stupid shit like "cishet white" for starters. Statistically, most people who do not care will be cishet white. Those who care, will also mostly be cishet white. With this type of exclusionary discourse bordering on racism, no one will ever listen to you because from the start, you already sound like you have nothing important to say. There's three types of people in the US: Slaves working 2 and 3 jobs to make ends meet, middle class being pit against the slaves by the third group, the capital. By using exclusionary discourse, assimilated from bougie fake activism, you're promoting infighting within the classes that should be hunting the capital like animals, the French way!
Edit: your country has sacrificed countless children to never eschew the right to bear arms. Well, stop bitching online to make yourself feel good and use them.
I heard something on a radio show during Covid on how to talk to people who have "gone down the rabbit hole". It was discussing MAGA as a cult. The guest on the show was a woman who was raised in a cult in the 70's and she "got out" and spent her time talking with others in the cult to help them to break free. I can't find a reference to the show, but I think it was Carrie Miller hosting.
My takeaway was that you can't come at people and tell them that everything they know is wrong and you will show them the way. They'll fight you. You need to deprogram them similarly to how they were programmed into the cult. Small bits, here and there to slowly guide them to questioning their beliefs. Once that happens, show them how to research and seek out information and let them know that they will be safe.
If someone found a link to the podcast/radio show, I'd be super happy.
I spend a good amount of energy trying to explain the merits of Marxism-Leninism and Leftism in general on Lemmy (and IRL, though that's much trickier). Ultimately, you can't make someone care. You can't convince people of something they choose not to want to believe, either, no matter how much evidence you throw at them. Roderic Day wrote a great article titled Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of "Brainwashing" that perfectly encapsulates this process. People license themselves to believe whatever it is that they believe benefits themselves, regardless of evidence or empathy.
What you can do, however, is explain the merits of that which you believe in, and this is far more effective with people already targeted by the current system. Those closest to the edge, those radicalized by their conditions but not yet organized or versed in theory, are the perfect people to talk to. The effort required to gain an ally in that sense is far less than someone who is convinced that the system is fine, but just needs a little tweaking. Building strength through organization helps legitimize your positions and expands the circle, so to speak, by moving the "line of radicalization" further. Person A, who believes the system is fine but needs tweaks, goes from comfortably mainstream into the new line of radicalization, one step away from working to supplant the system, when those who were radicalized near them organize.
Further still, as conditions deteriorate, more people are impacted and more people are radicalized. This is both good and bad, bad in the sense that more are affected by the evils in society to a greater degree, but with the good being further chance of organization.
Just my 2 cents as someone who has spoken with many different people about Marxism.
The first thing I would ask is, have you made any attempts to really understand what motivates them and why they believe as they do? Given your flippant dismissal of their belief systems, I suspect you have just mentally bucketed them and, instead of really trying to understand them, you fall back on your per-conceived notions of what you think they believe. Without that understanding, you will never be able to "make people care", because you are not treating them as fully formed people with their own beliefs and priorities. You expect that, if you just yell at them loudly enough, they will come around. They won't and, if anything, they will just dig their heels in further. To them, you're this guy:
Not everyone has the same priorities you do. What you see as "the most important thing in the world" may fall much further down the list for someone else. They may not even see it in the same framing you do. Maybe they do care about your thing, but they have their own "most important thing" and if your thing and their thing are in contention, they are going to pick their thing. This is part of the reason we have politics in the first place, once you start dealing with other people and trying to decide what and how things should be prioritized and run, you are going to run into differing beliefs and priorities. It's why most government polices generally suck and don't get everything done. Because those policies are the result of compromise between people with different and often competing priorities. And yes, it may be that some of those other priorities come from bad information, though more often they will come from radically different base beliefs. And not understanding what those beliefs actually are means that you will not have any sort of basis for convincing them of anything.
Changing peoples' minds is hard. But, it starts from a place of understanding people and not dismissing their beliefs. Step back from your outrage for a moment and try to really get in their heads. You may not agree with their position, but you need to understand how they got there before you have any chance of getting them out of it. And, maybe you can't. It may just be that they have some foundational beliefs which are completely at odds with what you want to convince them of. But, if you know and understand that, it becomes much easier to walk away from the situation and not waste time and energy on a hopeless fight. And while it feels good to yell at people, that basically never works and only serves to push them further away.
Lots of good answers here already. I'll just add that Jon Stewart recently did a great segment that touches on this. Basically, he says if everything the government does is "OmG nAzIz FaScIsTz TrAiToRz!!!" then people who aren't already paying attention will continue tuning it out. I forget at which time in the video he gets to this point, but honestly the whole 20-minute video is worth a watch.
People won't care until negative things start effecting them. Even at that point, many will still deny negative things are happening or they will put the blame somewhere else. This is why I believe things are going to have to get bad, really bad, before they can turn around. The biggest thing to go bad would be the economy. An economy so bad would be hard to deny and live with. Unfortunately, the more money you have, the longer you can "deal with" a bad economy, and still think everything is okay.
What would you like for them to do? Have they discussed how they vote with you? Or how they spend their money? Maybe they just don't want to talk about it at work?
How do you make people care before it's too late?
none of my co-workers care
You can't force another to care. We can educate them with facts and reason while trusting them to make their own choices. And, that isn't done in a workplace, instead one on one in presence of a human relationship.
But, if you insist, then there's always a way. Read the Bible as part of a Bible study to develop a nuanced understanding of its message. Relate that message to social democrat, socialist, communist, and anarchist ideology. Determine the relevant Bible passages useful in the specific situations you encounter with specific Christians, then memorize those passages. Then, in full context of Bible and situation, in the moment, quote the passage. Finally, shut up and wait.
I care, you care, and many of us here on lemmy care. We should work on how to coordinate ourselves together rather than try to change minds.
I've tried, a lot, to change minds. I started with the most difficult person, and recently a new hire at work is kinda centrist-left and I tried to convince him. No matter whether it's a nazi you're talking to (ahem.. the first one) or a liberal, minds can only change themselves. They have to want it, you cannot hack their brain and override it.
I gave up, because even the people who are closest to me politically seem to move further to the right when faced with uncomfortable reality. They don't engage with icky thoughts like "What if police killed an innocent man?". They rationalize it to keep their comfort zone intact. "Well, if they just followed police instructions..." blissfully unaware of many cases like Daniel Shaver.
You point to an example that breaks their rationalization, and they will diminish it. "Oh that cop made a mistake". Point to many examples and they suddenly got to go wash their hair. People's psyche protects them from stress.
And that is the default mindset in this society. Avoidance of discomfort and inconvenience. Fear of the unknown. They want their life to be neat and happy and to all make sense. They don't appreciate it when someone tries to take that away from them.
Do you think there's something about people like us that makes us more accepting of challenging our own worldviews? I have some thoughts but I've written enough.
I wish I knew. People keep telling me to "organize" and "strike". Like yeah a Walmart full of 60yo conservative white people is going to strike over this, fucking idiot.
Work in medical too, but work in the lower sections with the blue collar workers while living in the bible belt. They're all Trump fans and think this is all great.
The best advice I have is find your people, the ones you know who've been against this (not the non-voters, they folded to apathy, and will fold when the going gets tough) and start working on survival plans. Gardens, mutual aid, mutual defense, how to hide those in danger ESPECIALLY if you're the cishet white guy. Build the community as best you can.
This is not some big overall "Fight the bastions to overthrow" but right now as a regular schmuck in the middle of nowhere, right now this is what we have.
In the case of my mother, I instituted a no-politics rule in 2020. However, as of last week, I’m sending her accusatory emails about the various articles of his fucked up actions. I’ve decided that she is partially a bad person for having full info about who and what he is and chose not to know. I’m very angry and she’s going to keep hearing about it. The relationship might be over.
I know that doesn’t help your situation. I just needed to vent. As noted, I’m very angry. With her in particular. For choosing this again.
exclusively cishet white population
Red State? Then don't bother, nobody would care.
Look up the specific area around your workplace and trump's margin of victory, and you'll see just how fucked it is.
Preaching in a red area is a waste of time, I'm telling ya.
Edit: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/us/elections/2024-election-map-precinct-results.html
I think this works. Look it up.
Edit 2: Oh wow, my Precinct is more than +50 Harris. Go Philly! I'm glad to know that if a nazi is walking around doing the salute, they getting them ass beat.
Edit 3: HOLY FUCKING SHIT. I looked up my old place in NYC, and wtf a RED WAVE. +20 felon, +30 felon change from 2020. Jesus Fucking Christ. Glad I'm outta that hell.
NYC is so cooked, especially Brooklyn.
I think a better question is, how do we make our elected representatives care? (The answer, of course, is by not electing a**holes, but that's not going to happen until people really start to suffer).
As someone in a similar environment, there are others who care. It just isn't worth the risk to my job & professional relationships to talk about. Most people who don't care I won't sway anyways and anyone who does care doesn't need to talk to me. So, for the betterment of my family, I stay quiet at work. Outside of work though I'll talk to my friends & anyone who will listen about the risks of the current regime.
I think people tend to have a very narrow view of what goes on around them. And frankly, I don't think that's really a bad thing. Everyone does it. It's just a fact of life. But we have to account for it. Talking about big-picture issues doesn't work when people are focused their narrow view of the world. Even if they agree with the issue, they won't be riled up and take action. I think there's 2 takeaways to this:
First, regarding talking to the people around you: narrow your focus. Focus on things that affect them directly, or frame things in a way such that they interpret it in a way that affects them. Don't talk about concentration camps, talk about Trump retroactively rescinding birthright citizenship and how that might affect their lives (especially effective if that person happens to be an ethnic minority or is in a relationship with one). When talking about anti-immigration policies, focus on ICE arresting American citizens because they didn't look American enough. You don't have to convince people of everything, you just have to convince people of enough that they feel personally concerned.
Second, regarding yourself: it's easy to think that all Americans are similar to the people that you're with. Society is a bell curve. You don't need to shift the entire bell curve to the left to exact change. You just need to stretch it out leftward - pull the left leaning people more to the left. Trump didn't win by convincing leftists to be right-leaning, he won by convincing the right-leaning moderates into shifting right. Consider the audience and pick arguments that would be most effective against that particular audience. Be more direct toward more left-leaning people. Republican? Sow seeds of suspicion toward Trump. Moderate? Make them fear for their way of life. Left-leaning moderate? Maybe we should punish the rich. Leftist? Hell yeah socialism baby
When I meet someone who doesn't care, I work twice as hard to fix things.
You have more control over your attitude than over politics, or other peoples' opinions. Don't exhaust yourself and don't strain your relationships uselessly. They want to bring you down and push you out. I usually reject stoicism, but this is a good time to be stoic and keep your energy reserves, and your attitude, fresh.
