The problem is that libs refuse to actually accept the truth. "Oh that's not capitalism, that's cronyism!" "That's not capitalism, that's corporatism!" "That's not capitalism, that's just the problem with big government corruption!" "That's not capitalism, that's just one bad example!" etc etc etc. You can show them an absolute mountain of evidence and they'll just wave it away until they can't, at which point they switch to "Well maybe that is capitalism, but that's just the price we have to pay! It's the best system we got! It's human nature!!!"
It's entirely vibes-based. You could show a liberal every piece of evidence as to why capitalism or the United States is evil, and why even the "good" things aren't even that good, and they'd dismiss each point as you went as "Well, sure, but that individual data point doesn't spoil the project as a whole, it still possesses many good qualities," until they've dismissed the entire graph of points. Because nobody is actually thinking in terms of "I am a disconnected impartial observer. I have a long list as to why capitalism is good and why it's bad, I have a long list as to why communism is good and why it's bad, and so on for every ideology or sect of note, and I simply follow the one with the largest number of good points, or smallest number of bad points." They might think that they think like that, but they don't - it's largely just vibes and horror/feelgood stories in the media that they've internalized.
Nor am I saying that one should think like that, that just sounds fucking exhausting and also impossible because until aliens make themselves known, there are no beings outside of the class dichotomy.
Talk of “manufacturing” and “inventing” suggests an imposition over and against the individual’s will. I believe that, on the contrary, the process of Western propaganda is better understood in terms of “licensing”: the issuing of moral license for the bourgeois proletariat to profitably go along with bourgeois designs without the feeling of shame overwhelming. In this alternative account people aren’t “brainwashed” insofar as they don’t actually believe the lies, not in the way that we generally understand belief. It’s more correct to say that they go along with them, whether enthusiastically or apprehensively, because it’s actually their optimal survival strategy.
Given that most non-Marxist economics is just ahistorical fiction and explicitly designed to best serve the rich, economics as a field is also part of this "licensing", despite being used as a justification by many liberals as to why capitalism is good and communism is bad.
I don't think you're conclusion follows. It really just seems that worldviews are not susceptible to a Popperian style falsification, which philosophy of science already knew like 50 years ago.
Orphan Grinding and Orphan Grinding accessories has been our way of live for hundred of years. My grandest father caught his first feral orphan at the wee age of 12 metric years and his father taught him how to safely operate the machine, which back then required a whole room and grinding a single orphan took 2 hours. His grandfather lost a leg because of the dangerous conditions and an orphan-involved jammed femur. The machines are much smaller and safer these days.
For me it seems nowadays the "capitalism is evil" is often the easy part, but getting through the part of "unfortunately there's no realistic alternative" is hard, no one wants to listen through an hour long lecture on economic theory (I rarely interact with ideological liberals in a context where these discussions happen to be honest)
Actual libs get a pass, they're anticapitalists like us. Any capitalist claiming to be a lib or someone claiming a capitalist a lib is just messed up from the life-long programming
There is no such thing as an anti-capitalist liberal. Liberalism is the ideology of capitalism. Liberals created the capitalist world order. That's not life long programming, thats several hundred years of political theory and basic definitions.
If you want to pretend that liberal means something else great, just don't claim that everyone else in the world using the word correctly is wrong.
I mean I think Richard Rorty makes a compelling case that anti-capitalism actually carries the purported goals of liberalism further than so called "liberal" economics and so he was happy to identify self-consistently as an anti-capitalist liberal.