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.