Permanently Deleted
Here’s an interesting exercise to whoever’s reading this.
Look through these stories, and count how many (or what fraction) of them are determined by Material Conditions.
I was bourn to a default slightly conservative kind of centrist apolitical household. No one had any real interest in political type stuff but they ate a little ideology as a treat. They had me go to a Sunday school which was deeply evangelical and weird because it was close and they figured it’d be good for me. In fact it was traumatizing but not in any of the extreme ways. I did the edgy game, spiritual Buddhist, thing for a while. I was a college democrat because I thought it could fix something. I was probably completely dis illusioned and apathetic for years until I discovered a really good harry potter fan fiction that got me thinking about it again. It was the Rationalist one, and just sitting around with a friend talking about how the a better world could be possible got me thinking. Got caught up into the Bernie thing. Now, I am doing chinese on duo lingo hoping I get good enough to defect. Turns out my dad might have been right as the whole class war thing does fit in with the black and white morality I never fully unlearned from sunday school.
I was right wing by default until I was a teenager, since I grew up in an environment where teaching kids to parrot your talking points was considered cool or whatever. In freshman year of high school, the government teacher had us all take an awful left/right political test that put me slightly right of center and next to Colin Powell (totally would’ve been libertarian if it was Political Compass). I thought that was neat, which lead me to actually thinking about my own politics for the first time, and at the slightest actual thought about what I believed I swung left. I started with generic anti-authoritarian, anti-corporate, pro-redistribution, pro-minority-rights stances, which gradually became some sort of ancom as I was exposed to the relevant concepts.
Edit: Also the first media I consumed with a political message that I actually noticed as such was Gundam Wing, with its “accelerationism is dumb” message. I still believe that, and can’t rule out having picked it up from a giant robot anime.
i discovered r/atheism, anti-SJW types on youtube when i was like 9 or 10 and thought they were the smartest people i had ever heard; was anti-feminist for a bit, then became a “socialist” who wanted mild social democratic reforms for about a year. discovered either r/anarchism or r/completeanarchy, thought i was anarchist despite never reading theory or doing any actual work. eventually i found r/cth and realized i wanted communism
I luckily had my regular standard horseshoe theory/anti-“SJW” phase without much incident before 2016 came along and brought the “Oh, these guys are no longer joking and possibly never were” moment. Then Bernie happened, then four years of everything falling to shit, and by the time 2020 rolled around I was no longer a liberal or a capitalist, and now I spend my days asleep and my nights self-quarantined, pacing the floor in a caffeine daze, designing agitprop and building my new mask, watching the dying spasms of empire with horror and grim satisfaction.