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?
The potential for people to be - even partly - innately evil is a painful concept to grapple with.
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.
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.