That human beings are born as a blank slate (i.e. Tabula Rasa) that can be moulded, or re-moulded after their collective slates have been wiped clean, is a long standing tenet of the broader Left that rejects that human beings have any, or least any appreciable, innate nature, as James Lindsay describes below (which is quoted in full due to the limitation of Twitter’s/X’s embed).
The Leftist mindset is that people are the product of their conditions. I don’t mean this in some cutesy way that’s kind of true, that we are shaped by our conditions. They believe fully literally that we are the product of our conditions, and “conditions” are those things that shape systemic political power.
That applies to every aspect of life, down to how we think the world works, the vocabulary we might use to communicate, what our hopes and fears are, what’s true and false, what’s right and wrong, everything. In particular, it defines something like a horizon of possibility that people hold for their lives. Their present conditions prevent them from seeing beyond that horizon, so they accept the limitations of the present world (real, fake, or whatever).
They believe that every existing society operates like a brainwashing bubble that “socializes” its members into this set of conceptual and imaginative limitations, and they believe that the people who control society control and maintain the terms upon which people are constructed and defined (through socialization into that society).
Every harm, every injustice, everything they don’t understand, every foiled hope, every dream that isn’t actually possible, etc., is therefore an indictment of the people who hold power over the existing society. Anything that threatens the existing socialization program is therefore potentially good or useful and can be brought into use for Leftist ends.
