Share yall’s journey over here. Here’s mine. TLDR: apolitical -> chud -> lib -> based commie :sicko-laser:
Was mostly apolitical until the culture war shit of 2016 and I got sucked into anti-SJW youtube. Naturally I developped the standard reactionary views (systemic racism isn’t real, offensive = funny, gays are weird, etc).
Then I went on 4chan after seeing a funny video about them trolling Shia LaBeouf, and being edgy I naturally hit the “politically incorrect” board. I knew they were edgy and I had experienced racism before but the shit on there was something else to say the least.
After that I started questioning my views and realized how cucked it is to be a reactionary minority. At this point I was a lib, cuz fuck rightists but Communism seems silly.
What made me swing left is:
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Learning Obama and Trump both supported the corruput authoritarian president in my home country.
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Taking econ and having cognitive dissonance between the lessons and real life. If the profit motive rewards benefiting society then what’s up with climate change? If “supply/demand = cheap price” then why does my mother have to ration her medicine every other month? Etc etc.
Then I stumbled on a Parenti video and everything clicked. Thanks Parenti :michael-rosen:
Funny story. I was raised by racist chuds so while I had leftist views as a kid but had some chuddiness views from being influence by the people around me (think stupidpol minset). It took going to highschool and getting the shit kicked out of me by the indigenous students and then getting to know them in a legit effort to change to make me realise how fucked up my veiws were. I was then a socdem until around 2015 when I saw how ineffective electorialism is and how right-wing and weak the so-called leftist parties were.
Long story short, beat up racists.
I was a conspiracy junkie, I really liked the feeling of learning secrets that no one else knew. Besides the real out there shit like David Icke, though, you begin to notice a pattern, namely, that if you lift the rug of literally any major industry, you find evidence of terrible and immoral bullshit. At first you’re just assuming it’s all about individual greed, but this left unanswered the question of why these greedy people seemed to run everything. I had a sort of sudden revelation when I realized that, because of the competitive nature of capitalism, the theory of evolution applies, and the only parameter for fitness is profitability. Combine that with the fact that profit is, by definition, socially corrosive (taking more than you give is literally the moral of countless fables), and that goes a long way to explaining why everything seems to be getting worse all the time. Peter Joseph and his Zeitgeist and Culture in Decline series, an absolute shit-ton of Chomsky lectures, then finally Marx, and 10 years after I started looking into this shit, here I am, a unabashed and terminally online communist.
That’s a pretty good trajectory. I get the feeling that most conspiracy junkies who realize see a pattern just go “Jews! Jews everywhere!” because its always easier to blame some nefarious corrupting agent than to examine a system which enables corruption.
I never understood that, it’s a very unsatisfying explanation. It also doesn’t answer the core question, why institutions seemed designed to benefit the greedy. I realized, as I said, that it was an evolutionary system, and was extremely gratified to learn later that Marx understood this in the 19th century, (to paraphrase) that because of competition, the internal decisions of capitalists over their own businesses have the character of being coerced by a external force.
What country you from?
