Keep an eye out for opportunities to show them how their struggles in life are tied into the political order they live within. And if it’s hard to do that, try to understand the political order better first, so you can more communicate about those connections.

It’s relatively easy in the US, for example, to point out that the healthcare system is awful and “that issue you’re dealing with relating to your health would probably be less of one with a better system”. But for some people, they are going to have a view of capitalist realism here or they are going to think “so what? if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride”. So you may have to get more specific about what exactly is wrong with the system in specifics, why it’s possible it could be better in actionable terms.

Then there is stuff where it’s trickier to draw connections, even though the connections are undeniably there. For example, someone who is struggling in dating. Patriarchal socializing and system and the resulting dynamic along with the pushes against it have contributed to making things more fraught, fearful, and tenuous. As well as how the capitalist order pushes individualization and atomization. Trust is low, women have lots of real reason to be fearful and to just prefer independence if that’s that vs. risking being with a controlling man. Women are taught to expect someone who can only speak one emotion flavor: anger/outrage, and to devalue their own emotions. Men are taught to only express anger/outrage and see the rest as weakness. There is all kinds of stuff like this you can get into because the political order is the social order is the economic order is the everyday life. They are inextricably interconnected. And in a meta way, recognizing this in itself as a fact may be necessary to shake some people out of the malaise, so that they stop viewing highly conditional systems in a particular country in a particular period in time as historical inevitabilities of the human species.

Too often online I encounter a sentiment like “X is human nature,” “people are tribal”, “this is how things have always been.” It’s simply not true and there’s no getting around the fact that if you want to get through to those particular people, you have to somehow get past their false beliefs about history and humanity. Which you don’t necessarily have to argue with directly. Showing them how things are intertwined right now in their life may naturally help them see how contextual a political order.

Edit: wording