self and class consciousness is tough man, especially if you’ve lived that way your whole life, you learned to live like that from a very young age, and furthermore if you have childhood or other trauma that incentivizes you to keep yourself from becoming conscious in order to avoid processing painful memories without a sufficient framework (or social support) to do so. unless you have a material interest, a material need to become conscious, most people don’t, and that’s okay. that doesn’t make them any less rational

on the other hand, jealousy and lack of contentedness seem like internal contradictions for you to work on personally, regardless of how you relate to or interpret others. in my opinion jealousy is a cognitive error taught to us by liberalism, and the correct response is actually something more like inspiration or wonder. in my own personal experience, my feelings of jealousy were derived from insecurity (material, leading to psychological) that i experienced as a young child, and resolving those feelings has made it much easier to not feel jealous of others.

if you feel that the way you interact with things (from what you said, primarily how you consume media) is the only possible way for you, but you don’t feel content about it, i would explore why it is that you feel that way. if you feel that the way you interact with things is truly inferior than the approach of others for any reason, and yet you still feel compelled to interact with things in the way that you do, i would investigate why. and if you’re uncertain which of those two statements is more correct, i would investigate that as well.

i think it’s not enough to just point out errors of liberalism in the fashion of mao and expect them to be magically corrected. if we fully accept the rationality of every human (on an individual and class level), then there are always specific material reasons why we learned to think incorrectly, as it were. in the same way that diamat gives us the tools to investigate the history of society in terms of its internal contradictions, dialectical materialism also gives us the tools to investigate - and resolve - our own internal contradictions, resulting in more correct and less liberal cognition.

sorry for the text dump hahaha. it’s just something i happen to have been thinking a lot about lately.