Yes, I know we're mostly actually :LIB: here but for the sake of discussion let's pretend otherwise.
I'll start. I left behind a very right wing upbringing, the kind that had family members that openly expressed sympathy and support for nazis, said "the wrong side won the war" and even believed that "science" would have been far more advanced if only a certain WW1 veteran and painter had his way through the 1940s. I left it behind, but I brought much unexamined ideology with me. :zizek:
For most of my college years, I was an alienated and insufferably smug neoliberal that didn't even know there were options between "respectful conservatives" like William F. Buckley, Jr. and Clinton-era liberals. I assumed that older leftist movements had simply ceased to exist and were no longer relevant so I didn't think much about them. Most of my opinions and hopes for the future were shaped by whatever pie in the sky post-Extropian hopium dealers I hopped between, from Kurzweil to worse.
Some of my takes were so bad I feel reluctant to share them, even here, even now. I will say that I once believed that the only real problem with eugenics was that society would push back and the controversy would sabotage the "good" it would do. I also, naturally, had such a preoccupation with death cheating and life extension bargaining-phase coping with young adult existential dread that I saw depopulation as another necessary evil that would have unfortunate society-wide pushback. There would have to be a lot less people if the ones that lived forever were going to be around forever, at least until the near-infinite bounty of asteroid mining and such came about.
I had many post-911 :brainworms: as well. I was simultaneously a believer in compromise as a solution to almost any disagreement but also had my mind shut to anything other than the conservative-liberal false dichotomy. Whatever those scary Muslims were up to, if it wasn't friendly to the United States, it was certainly a threat to civilization itself had had to be stopped no matter the cost, tragic as that was. :liberalism:
I was involved with the New Atheist movement for most of my college years and young adulthood, and my disillusionment really didn't set in until Dawkins' "Dear Muslima" letter and once I stumbled upon the realization of what a quack Sam Harris is and always was.
So-called "futurology" conferences that I used to enthusiastically be a part of started to get bought out by billionaires under pretense of hosting and sponsorship, and when the military started shoving its way in to some of the venues I used to be interested in, I checked out.
During and after college, I worked to survive. Work taught me sympathy for my fellow workers, and it also taught me that my bosses weren't particularly good at anything but had the power. That got me started on a new path.
It wasn't a single event but a process, and I'm still on the path I started to take.
Mostly lib. But tbh, I always kinda leaned leftist and just didn't know anything about it, having not been exposed to actual leftism. (I'm in my late 30s btw).
I remember as a kid of like 10 or something asking my mom and grandpa what communism was. And they were explaining to me that it was a system of government where everything was shared. To their credit, they didn't paint it with the brush of total horror and complete evil that I would later encounter from most other people, but they did try to explain to me that it turned out bad and that it just inevitably always does. But I remember specifically being like.. "wtf? Why is that bad? That sounds like the way things should be." I'd press them on what happened and how it turned out "bad" and the answer was that it was complicated, i.e., they didn't know.
In high school in the 90s, our civ/econ teacher who was rumored on campus for being a communist, which was more a weird novelty than an evil thing, gave us a political compass test. I thought it was brilliant that there was a whole other axis to the usual right-left paradigm. And sure enough, with the answers I gave, I scored as being pretty much at the far left bottom. "Anarchism" was still just "chaos, no rules, punks with mohawks!" and absolutely not a coherent ideology, so I certainly did not equate it with my political compass test, which just told me I was "anti-authoritarian libertarian." I didn't think too much more about it, but you have to understand, this was the 90's, the end of history, pre 9/11.
(How I wish I could go back and actually talk to and learn something from that old commie econ/civics teacher. Among many other things, one question would be like... how he was even able to keep his job when it was an open secret he was a communist?)
I got sucked into the new atheism thing in the early 00's, and thought that was the future of political thought. (Yeah, I cringe at myself for that now). But when the great split happened, in part due to elevatorgate (btw, it's cool to see Rebecca Watson get posted here sometimes), I was firmly and fervently on the pro-SJW side. I couldn't believe the vileness and bigotry that had been lurking that whole time in the movement I thought was going to be the culture war that was eventually going to end right wing stupidity. Still identified as a liberal of course, as I did when Obama was campaigning. I was reading Christopher Hitchens and learning that he was a Trotskyist, something I had only vaguely been aware of as something having to do with politics and the Soviet Union (which was of course ruled by a repressive totalitarian regime, as everyone knew). I thought Noam Chomsky was extremely cool too. I started reading wsws.org, who my lib dad introduced me to. He was also reading books about Che Guevara and I respected his (my dad's) political opinions, as I had since back when I had gone to anti-war (first gulf war) protests with him as a little kid.
Anyway, I started thinking of myself as a Trotskyist, mostly because I didn't know a goddamn thing about any of it, but was realizing communism was good actually, but that it must have been corrupted because again, everyone knows Stalin bad. Mao pretty bad. Fidel? Fidel must be bad, because no freeze peach etc. If Che had lived, then all would have been good though.
But then I started reading. And I started watching people online who were actual communists arguing. (And I just want to say here, I still think arguing with people online IS A GOOD THING TO DO. It doesn't matter if who you're arguing with will never be convinced or won over, but people silently watching, the lurkers like me, are recognizing the valid arguments. It makes a difference. But that's a complete tangent.)
And I won't go into the next decade and a half, except to say that I ended up here. Also that I'm rather drunk and also going through withdrawal from other drugs so this is just a long, rambling, boring wall of text that no one gives a shit about, understandably. It might not even make sense. But it was kinda fun looking back while typing. So thanks for asking UlyssesT.
Your story was weirdly inspiring to me. Thank you for writing it. :sankara-salute:
Aww. Well, cool. I'm not sure how, but I'm glad it was. Cheers comrade. :rosa-salute: And thanks again for the thread, it has been really illuminating reading the responses.
It's a long rambling wall of text that I care about comrade :ancom-heart:
Thank you comrade. This is a late reply, but I just wanted it to be known that I really appreciated reading that. :heart-sickle: