Like ok. When I was a lib, I had a lot of communist values already. I was already socdem leaning (though an Obama supporter because I foolishly believed he stood for those values). The vast majority of times I moved left involved some sort of confrontation with a person to my left on an issue. Sometimes there was resistance on my part, but that usually involved just like, a single argument, me realizing they were right, and moving left on the issue. Other times it was just… receiving information I didnt previously know. The closer to ML I got, the harder the struggles were, as some of the current geopolticial issues and also historical issues involved in that were the hardest to deprogram and the most hard coded. But I still got there.
Even simply openly calling myself as a communist was as simple as seeing someone else on Tumblr openly do so and realizing “oh wait thats an option?”
Oddly, “lesser evilism is not actually the correct way to approach electorally” was kind of my final gate? Despite being a poster here I sort of secretly still was a lesser evilist up until the recent stuff with Gaza. So it wasnt a straight line admittedly, but what it did do was give me a certain line of thinking about what the mindset of people who vote Democrat were.
In the midst of autistic myopia, I sort of for a long time believed that most libs were “communists in waiting” too. I sort of assumed you just had to spread the word, and they’d get there. Maybe they’d struggle on some of the same points I did, like not automatically believing a protest movement is good because its a protest movement, or that “America bad” isnt actually a bad way of thinking and critically supporting anti-American forces in the world is in fact the correct thing to do, and of course as I mentioned lesser evilism. But for the most part, you just had to give them permission to be communist. You just had to normalize it.
So seeing liberals like, be presented with the option to move left and slamming the door closed violently. Even on the most basic and obvious things. It was disheartening. I really thought it would be easier than that!
Theres this recent awful trend on TikTok (one Ive mostly only just heard of, because I’m not on that platform) of people “turning in their leftist card” over real leftists not flocking to support Harris and being principled about opposing genocide. One particular one, the only one I’ve seen with my own eyes, was a guy saying he “just found out he’s not a leftist, he’s a liberal, and [he’s] turning in [his] leftist card”. Like, whats happening there is a liberal is learning for the first time that he’s a liberal. But like, my experience with that realization was to go “oh, so THATS what leftism is? OK. let me travel there” (yaknow, like I said, on average lol, it wasnt always that easy). So seeing the door slam for me is kinda weird? Still to this day despite being somewhat used to it now?
I used to be such a naive liberal that I seriously believed that evil simply did not exist, and the closest thing to evil was just ignorance. By that, I meant that anyone with sufficient knowledge simply would not choose to do harmful things to other people or to the planet if only they knew better.
That idealism took a serious scorching hit around 1999 when I learned that some people with tear gas know exactly what tear gas does and how tear gas feels and that tear gas isn’t really necessary to apply to people that were already cuffed and otherwise unable to fight back.
I saw the looks on those faces. They knew what they were doing and they were savoring it like hogs at the trough.
My journey leftward was still a journey but that was quite a first step.
Yeah I believed essentially this for a long time. Like I’m pretty sure bullshit like “Hitler thought he was doing the right thing” came out of my mouth at some point.
I mean to some extent I still struggle with it. I have a hard time believing that “regular people” that I meet and can interact with can just be straight up evil. I still can only feel that way about historical figures and politicans and famous sex pests (and even then, only the worst ones) and such. I prefer to believe people are misguided in most cases. My mind tends to relate to why people think that way. And I mean, I am a stubborn rehabilitation and restoration guy when it comes to justice to this day, but now thats somewhat curtailed by the knowledge that some people cant be rehabilated, its just better to stick to it as a policy for a state.
That point about tear gas is good though.
I believed exactly that once upon a time, that even Hitler surely had the best possible intentions and he was just mistaken.
Me too. Sometimes I have to stop, check my own presumptions, and remember not everyone actually wants others around them to be happy and well, that some people outright crave the pain and death of others, and that appealing to compassion that simply isn’t there was a fool’s errand when dealing with such monsters.
Oh, one more thing about Hitler: learning that he “loved” the German people so much that he ordered them to die and be annihilated once they “failed” his hubris-laden megalomania made me realize that such monsters don’t even love what they claim they love, not when such “loved” ones cease feeding the insatiable hole in themselves.
Depending on your definition of evil, I still think evil doesn’t exist. I think people are products of their circumstances, and that’s the end of it really. Many people of course are malicious, but only because their ape brains learned from the world to be that way. Improving those circumstances for everyone is consequently the most important pursuit to reducing what would be the closest thing I’d label as ‘evil’.
I partially agree with you, though previously I saw it from a paradoxically “rationalist™” point of view that because I couldn’t distill evil particles into a test tube that evil as a concept simply could not exist, not even as a broad-brushed way of comprehending the phenomenon of people choosing to hurt people for the sake of hurting them.
Yes, we are primates, though way too often, both libs and chuds like pulling the “nature” card to justify their own selfishness, so I tend to shy away from such terminology myself, even if technically correct. Besides, especially when it comes to cruel Mengele-like experiments on primate brains by
startup grifts, primates also deserve better. 
EDIT: Also, the more harmful and dangerous kinds of Cluster-B personality disorders, the kind that tend to be associated most closely with what literature has called “evil” for millennia, have a genetic component as well as an environmental one. Not everyone in the same environment turns out the same way; I think that’s too much a simplification.
And if we really got stuck arguing the “human nature” topic with someone there’s plenty of evidence of sharing in nature when own needs are met. If people’s (shared of course) subjective experience of most humans = selfish dicks is evidence at all, it is equally evidence of human nature being subject to the environment it lives in. Yaknow, a fucking hellhole
I think much of the suffering and precarity that most people experience under late stage capitalism isn’t just a happy accident and is deliberately perpetuated so that people never have the energy or means to punch upward. It’s why
needs at least so much unemployment at all times, for example.
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The potential for people to be - even partly - innately evil is a painful concept to grapple with.
i don’t think it’s actually true though. like you can argue someone can be predisposed towards doing evil but there’s literally always a context that could technically exist that would lead even the most “naturally evil” person to never actually do anything - or possibly even think anything - evil. There’s examples of so-called sociopaths living completely normal lives out there. There’s basically never an excuse for evil and that’s exactly what someone being innately only capable of it is- an excuse. It implies that not only are we justified in trying to exterminate them from existence, not because of what they have done or what they believe, but because of what they were born as, and I think that’s suspicious as shit. Not to mention how it would innately absolve them of their crimes, because they would literally not have a choice if they were genetically determined to do bad things! I don’t want to absolve murderers and terrible people of responsibility, and saying that an evil gene exists would lead to that, there would be no way to actually blame those with the “evil gene” for what they do, and it would come down to just another “you have a bad brain” type ableist accusation. Capitalists aren’t evil because they were born with the evil gene, they’re evil because they’re capitalists. Because they do capitalist things like exploit poor people.
I genuinely don’t think “evil disorders” exist and that the only thing that does exist is disorders that can lead people to have a higher capacity for evil but due to the situational nature of reality that can be anything from being slightly more gullible than your average person to being more anxious/skeptical than your average person (two opposite traits that could both lead to evil in the right contexts). A neurotypical person could be born into a community built to turn neurotypical people into exploiters and become an exploiter, and a narcissistic sociopath could be born into a community built to turn narcissistic sociopaths into cooperative people and end up being a cooperative person.
It all comes down to us being unable to actually accomodate for what we consider “strange” neurotypes, which ends up with them being horrible people because we teach them “doing horrible shit is cool actually and you can get away with it”, sometimes on accident and sometimes not.
That’s probably the crux of it. It’s hard to figure out both why people who went through similar experiences and people with similar neurotypes turn out good or bad. I find it hard not to veer into either extreme of everyone being innately good and some people being innately bad. I’m nowhere close to being equipped to reckon with the messy reality of morality we live in.
I’m not entirely happy with it, either.
Then again, I’m not entirely happy with the paradoxically idealistic notion that every single human being would have the exact same outcome in personality if only they had the exact same amount of food, shelter, and access to amenities.
yeah no, neurodivergent theory is literally in direct opposition to this. tons of people need entirely different resources and entirely different lifestyles and environments for them to turn out happy and treat others well. and i think this nuance is not limited along arbitrary DSM lines, it’s probably extremely granular and selective from person to person due to the sheer variety of different neurotypes possible.
I don’t even fully agree with the distinctions and attempts to dryly categorize how brains work in psychiatry myself, but see it as a clumsy but still somewhat useful attempt to at least try to understand broad categories of difference between individuals.
Paradoxical as it may seem, I think coarse materialistic perspectives such as “everyone acts exactly the same way if their material conditions were the same way” are a sort of idealism themselves.