I was talking to a friend yesterday who is also a coder. His parents are Chinese from the region where Hong Kong is, but he was raised in America. And he kept saying that capitalism is not perfect, but is the best that we got and that there is not real freedom on socialism because you cannot vote the poliburo out and that Marxism has been tried and didn’t work out but that capitalism adapts to the real world with trial and error and blah blah.
No matter what I said, he wouldn’t yield. We spent an hour and a half on a discussion about it. It ended up with him saying “We are not going to convince each other so let’s stop”. Mind you that he was the one who kept asking me question but barely let me speak.
He was like “I read about Marxism, and I just realized that it doesn’t apply to the real world”
If it only takes an hour to convince someone of a world-changing idea then we’d have an abundance of revolutions that come and go. I mosly found “success” by directing questions to my interlocutor, so I would be in control more or less of where the discussion is heading while maintaining the other person’s introspective and critical spirit. The goal is for them to leave the discussion with something to think deeply about.