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.
Further:
The Left really believes this, though. They also believe they can see a little beyond the present horizon to greater freedom (“liberation” from the existing system and its harms). They believe they should therefore control the socialization program (which is always running) to make people like themselves who can see a little beyond the rim.
Part of what they believe is that the people who have the power in society, or who benefit from its current arrangement (as they would put it), do everything they can to limit people’s abilities to see beyond the rim, so they fight to keep people inside the current bubble. That’s how they either oppress or are complicit in oppression.
They believe they, themselves, are not perfect but are more enlightened (or Elect) than people who accept the current system as how it is (“the status quo”). They should therefore seize the means of production of the socializing forces and conditions in order to make people who can see the world differently, outside of the existing (false, imposed) limitations.
This all gets wrapped up in political power. The control of the bubble is ultimately political, they assess, therefore everything is political because the terms by which we understand it are political. The current politics are bad, and their different politics would be good, so it’s a moral imperative for them to take over and open up idealistically beyond the horizons of realism.
Because they are collectivist and statist in their beliefs about how society works, they believe the state will be the object that controls how people are socialized. That is, the state might not produce the conditions that produce and limit people, but it enforces the boundary and could enforce different boundaries.
Therefore, they believe the state, acting as the incorporation of the people who can see beyond the rim, should be the instrument for resocializing people in the new way and that it is a matter of moral necessity to empower the state to do this against the actors in society who benefit from that not happening (“oppressors”).
This “incorporation of the people” thing is also understood literally, in the collectivist sense. The society itself is like one body, and each person is like a cell in that body, all meant to work in harmony together for the good of the whole. The state has the power to organize and discipline that body (like the Mind or Will) and therefore should be given that authority.
Anyone who resists this awakening, collectivist incorporation, and transformation is maintaining oppression and should be resocialized or destroyed because of the threat they pose to the body. That is, they’re cells of a cancer to heal or to eliminate. Those people are trapping us within a false set of limits that harms people, mostly for their own benefit, which is a cancer to the body.
This is how they see the world, and it comes out in expressions like the below: “Doesn’t matter [how good the outcomes are], the primary purpose of elementary/middle school isn’t to teach it’s to socialize your kid. You can’t do that alone.”
For some, this is a philosophical bug; for others, a feature.
