Two black pills on public opinion are that:
1) Public opinion is incredibly malleable to social conformity, incentives, media control, and repetition 1.
2) Once all the infrastructure to make the change is finally in place, the final step by which public opinion is made / changed is basically just p-hacking:
People basically just have to be exposed to a large quantity of seemingly-plausible soundbites many times over. Controlling for the truth content of an argument, rather than how the argument logically fits with all the other arguments, it’s really just the sentiment of the argument (meaning the general position it sounds like it fits with) that matters in this process. From the perspective of a grand campaign, high-caliber texts and discussions mostly just exist to get other intellectuals to stop producing things which can be used to p-hack in the wrong direction.
Dangerous memes:
Sometimes, an argument will logically fit with a certain narrative when used appropriately, but will give off a general vibe of looking like something the other side will say. These present a latent danger which isn’t immediately obvious to elites when operating in the world of what is rigorously sensible. The elite of any movement should take care to A) identify these dangerous memes and contain them to make sure that they aren’t disseminated down through the lower levels of the IQ hierarchy; and B) have an antidote ready beforehand for if/when they eventually become a problem.
A good example in my opinion would be post-modernism.
Others examples may be A) that economic value is subjective; B) that the measurement of things like inflation are therefore subjective; or C) that ethical value is subjective.
Generally, any complex argument can easily be deployed incorrectly; smoothebrains, not understanding the argument, think that deploying the argument is just like summoning a pokemon card, and will often just reduce it to thinking that they’re making the argument by using relevant vocabulary in random ways. Meanwhile, smart people are allergic to stupidity, and so if they don’t already believe the argument, then seeing an argument be deployed in an incorrect manner may vaccinate smart people against the poor version of the argument even if they’d have found the proper version convincing. If then, the smart people encounter an incorrectly-deployed argument a second time, they will recognize the vocabulary which tends to correlate with the argument being made, and they will just be dismissive under the assumption that it’s an argument that morons tend to make.
There are ideas in the general school of thought of post-modernism which have real merit to them. However, to the degree that the masses digest them, they’ll take the ‘non-existence of truth’ to either mean that:
A) This is carte blanche to endorse takes which are truly random opinions, often based on little to nothing; best case scenario, this is direct ideological attrition2; worst case scenario, they remain associated with you and they make you look bad by associating you with their dumb takes.
B) They take this to mean that nothing is true except when shitlibs need it to be true or when the most surface-level of ‘fairness’ morality needs it to be true.
The net effect of post-modernism is that it will just act to protect whatever ideas achieve hegemony in society. This is because the ideas in power are few, and their alternatives are many. Post-modernism attacks them all equally, and the dominant ones have more resources with which to survive the passive environmental deconstructions.
In light of this, its best to just:
A) resolve to never refer to it as ‘post-modernism’ when you decide upon employing post-modernist arguments or reasoning
B) feed the masses simple soundbites that are dismissive of post-modernism as an overall concept; here are two good ones:
1. “Postmodernism is not an attempt to avoid mistakes, but an attempt to build them in such a way that the very concept of a mistake has no application.”
2. “If truth doesn’t exist, then it can’t be true to say that truth doesn’t exist.”
Of course, when you get into the weeds, post-modernism just has to do with truth being hard to discern. Anybody who takes it seriously really just recognizes A) that there are a multitude of degrees of plausibility; and B) that there are cases when, instead of some position being justifiably endorsable, there are only certain positions which are justifiably dismissable. It may even sometimes be the case that it’s possible to come to a correct answer but that it’s too-large of an amount of work such that it’s worth simply tolerating the ambiguity for the time being.
Sadly, when the smoothebrains come into contact with the sorts of thinkers who document all the different mechanisms that contribute to the difficulty inherent to ascertaining truth, and when they see evidence that these things affect opinion, they come to the conclusion that all opinion and all truth is caused by said mechanisms rather than coming to the conclusion that we can get closer to the truth by correcting for them.