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"Critical thinking skills only count if they're MY critical thinking skills" do they not see the irony?
There is a baseline assumption that "logical thinking" means everyone reaches the same conclusions.
It largely depends on what lense you parse your logic through, if its the lense of accumulating wealth and power you will almost always reach the same conclusion, the same if you use dialectical Materialism you will almost always reach yhe same conclusion. In the first instance you wont be able to understand how others can't see the truths that are burning into your retinas, while in the latter truth you will understand exactly why they avoid the rubric of logic which brings makes their lifestyle unable to accept they are everythig wrong with the world and dragging us int a greenhouse heat death in the pursuit of profit.
the same if you use dialectical Materialism you will almost always reach yhe same conclusion
Material and historical conditions vary widely. Dialectical Materialism exists to synthesize solutions to a variety of contradictions. Stalin, Mao, and Tito reached some very different conclusions, despite growing up during the same international conflagration. Subsequent leftist revolutionaries - from Che to Chavez, had their own takes on the best path forward. A lot of leftist infighting can be attributed to these differences in baseline material condition.
A relatively wealthy leftist living in the imperial core is going to have this sense of living in a post-scarcity world with a relatively liberal social order, while a Philippian labor organizer is going to be struggling just to survive while the state's brutal police forces actively hunt them. Chinese communists and Vietnamese communists have a very acrimonious history together and are easily pitted against one another by European industrialists. And coalition building between northern Indian communist farmers and the Kashmiri neighbors who they are in economic competition with is extremely difficult.
While you can always talk about the straight hyper-moral correct positions, they don't always lend themselves to the physical labor involved in building local movements or the historical biases native to your region.
One big take away of dialectical materialism is that outcomes aren't clear and conclusions aren't certain. You always need to try things, anticipate failure, and move forward from there. You can't trap yourself in rigid ideology or you'll find that ideology used against you as soon as capitalist leadership can adopt that rhetoric.
Or if they're like a few people I know...whose critical thinking skills are "parrot opinions from someone who I think is almost as smart as me (according to me) because I exclusively listen to them"