Full confession: I used to believe in The Mission. :surprised-pika:
To be more specific, I didn't believe in :my-hero: 's The Mission in particular, but I sincerely believed that government gridlock (yep, like I said, liberal take) was making space exploration impossible and that if any meaningful progress was going to be made in my lifetime, it would be by private industry. I wasn't particularly enthralled by any specific billionaire, but I had the cynical/deluded belief that "humanity must become an interplanetary species" and that absolutely everything else came second to that.
How about you, (hopefully) ex-libs of Hexbear?
When I was in middle/high school I was basically a positivist, I thought the highest truth was the scientific method and that the problems of the world could be understood as a matter of how educated and rational (or not) people were. You could solve problems by simply spreading the correct opinion, and the correct opinion is a thin veneer over verifiable scientific work.
As you can imagine, this method is how the very worst liberals justify their monstrous ideas, so I'm glad I took a break from that pretty early. But still... hoo boy was that some serious lib shit.
I had almost this exact same take, and it shames me now.
lol we can cringe at our past selves together, comrade
Positivism isn't so bad, just incomplete. It's the highest form of naive materialism. Russell and Carnap et al were all Succdems. But it does prevent further progress in a haze of "this is the perfect way to do an science!"
At least you avoided the ultimate in liberalism, the Falsificationist bro or the Kuhn paradigm guy.
Totally agree but I must admit I was definitely a falsification bro for a while
this but with communism