Ignorance and Politics

As of late, I've started to see how one's knowledge of the world influences one's look on the world in a political way.

An Example Rather Close to Home

From the nest I grew up in, I inherited a left leaning position. But due to the elementary (I have no idea what it actually would be as other school systems don't really make sense to me) school I went to had a somewhat dogmatic idea of peace. As I've always had a somewhat allergic reaction to authority, I rebelled against said ideas of peace. This in turn, caused my political position to shift to the right in the long run.

This started to shift during the whole gamer gate... thing, and the resulting cultural clusterfuck. As undoubtedly many young people have gone through, the general shifting went firmly rightwards. I never went as far as holding particularly racist opinions, the furthest I got in practice was faintly edgy humor in that regard. Though I did develop a fairly strong interest in Nazi iconography. Casual misogyny mostly in the form of "Women's rights? What's the point in fighting for those nowadays?" definitely got its hooks into me. Another aspect that was quite strongly enforced at the time was a rather present layer of casual homophobia.

Most of this came crashing down due to two things. One being the reporting on the Charlottesville riot by the usual suspects I followed, versus seeing how things actually occurred. The other being figuring out I'm not exactly straight. I can't really tell which one played a bigger role in my return to being a more reasonable person. Nor do I really know how quickly everything really happened as I seem to have repressed quite a few of those memories.

Lengthy but solid Charlottesville coverage by Shaun.

The result of this crash was me spinning on my heel and pretty much making a complete 180 into left wing ideology, quite far off from the center. Part of this journey was re-evaluating everything that was said by the people in my old content consumption list. I quite quickly came to the realization that most of the people that were attacked by those on my old list, merely expressed an opinion two blips to the left of what the -- let's face it, most those people are rather viscious -- attacker considered acceptable.

I've seen it mentioned before that right wing ideology is generally based on ignorance and having a hard time accepting the world isn't as simple as you perceive it to be from your comfortable little bubble. While on the other hand, left wing ideology is based on staring at reality to the point where it hurts.

A Friend

One of my best friends has a tendency to be struck much harder whenever he's confronted with reality. A tendency I see in his behavior is to have a little bubble, as expected, and to then have quite a hard time when his bubble is proven to be less perfect then it is. In a some sense I envy him. Being able to respond the way he does to most situations. Most things don't really seem to get to him as he mostly doesn't seem care to look much below the surface.

I get it though, he's been brought up by wealthier types and he's not particularly anti authoritarian. In fact, his general strategy is often that of blatant appeasement up front while said front is usually not directly what it seems. As a result he simply doesn't _need_ to look below the surface. The source of this is a tendency to trust other people that they are correct, much like I had and to a certain degree still have. On it's own, this is not outright horrible, but it makes one an easy target. Awareness of one's weaknesses is key.

As a result he's often in the situation of taking blows to his bubble due to being around people like me. I really appreciate him for taking those blows and listening to our experiences. He's a great ally to have in this waking nightmare called life.

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