When I first began to engage with this stuff, my frame of reference was being completely determined by the lists of rules I was given to live by. As I began to read this stuff I was feeling like, how could I have been so wrong about everything? If all I ever wanted to do was help people and I still believed so many harmful things, how can I trust myself to be right in the future? If everything I know is just another cherry in the basket then I won't trust myself until my basket is full. I can't start laying out the puzzle until I had all the pieces--that at some point I would learn enough "truths" to see the picture for myself.

The problem was I was still writing lists except now they didn't say "Violence is wrong", "listen to minorities", and "Vote blue no matter who" but "Obama is bad for drone strikes", "Guns are okay actually", and "idpol is bad". I would do the work to pick apart a liberal opinion and walk right into another--why? When will I finally know enough to know the difference? The rabble of disagreement and ping ponging between macro and micro issues becomes overwhelming. Where to focus? Where to try? Being the only person in my immediate life to vocalize these concepts, whenever a liberal idea would come up I would challenge it. Not aggressively, just saying things like "you know what I read an article recently that said..." in a way that's asking them to verify, not telling them it's true. Since no one thought of me as a leftist, it's amazing the amount of good faith I was met with. As the weeks wore on and my vocabulary got bigger, I started hearing things like "what are you a socialist now" and I was really confused. I still hadn't read a word of Marx, I was just being informed of better ways to accomplish our goals and was confused when the ideas were dismissed and not challenged.

As this tension came to a head I would get flustered when the conversation turned back on me, feeling so fragile in my new ideology and waiting for some liberal fact to drop on my head an destroy it. But it didn't happen. As soon as I stopped centering myself I was able to take a step towards battling my ego and say the words out loud "I don't know, teach me". "Obama is good" "I heard he's not" "that's ridiculous" "Oh okay, teach me why". This has shut down more conversation than anything else. Become baby. If I felt that anxious panic that usually precedes yelling declarative statements, I would take a deep breath and just start asking questions. Feeling ill prepared to say I "knew" something, I just started asking people what they knew. And it was very, very little. It wasn't that I had learned enough true fax to own them, they were owning themselves because no one ever digs in past the declarative to see the deeper contradictions. It's not about the things we know, but how we argue. Understanding what logic really is was very helpful--it's not the things we believe but the methods we use to believe them.

Eventually as people became more annoyed with me they started doing the whole "well if you're so smart convince me that nothing bad will ever happen under socialism" which is of course ridiculous. At first I would sputter out scattershot defenses I would see online, later I would ask "why would something need to be perfect to be worth doing?" Don't get stuck on the facts, they're just used to justify feelings. Ask people what they feel. I had to "rip the wires out" on what I thought I knew. Trying to find where I put the wrong number in the sudoku was driving me nuts so I eventually I just started over. You're probably still believing things you don't realize you do and those won't change with facts but understanding what you want.

I am no better or worse, less deserving or more deserving of anything than any other animal growing like mold on this slo mo roiling ball of liquid minerals. If I started a new save file and tried to forget anything socialized I'm returned to by basic instinct--to not feel pain. This may just pertain to me, but I don't believe in God, I don't believe in a soul or the afterlife. I didn't ask to be born, but I don't want to die and almost every single human on this planet is in the same boat (starting therapy really helped to put this in perspective--if you have access I recommend it). Even Donald Trump is just an animal drawing on his trauma to decide what to do. Human brains, human ideas, human needs, they're all nonsense. Life is an absurd accident, not built to do or be anything. All that is "true" is what exists, how we decide to feel and take action is determined by what we each value. Most people couldn't tell you their ideology because they probably don't really have one, just a list of rules to live by backed up by the Trojan biases we call "opinions".

My liberal view made the world feel as if it was too scattered and disparate to understand. I thought I was looking at a puzzle full of holes of things I didn't know, that I was unable to see the picture because I didn't have enough pieces. But it was never a puzzle, it just looked flat because I'd been standing in the same place for so long. All the important pieces were there, I just had to reorient my position to see it. The point at which I'm standing now is the very base of my ideology--I hate pain and don't want to feel it and as such would not want other to feel it either. I don't need to know a fact to know that what someone is saying or presenting isn't going to meet that goal and if I don't' have the information I need to make that determination, then I ask for more. Stop thinking of things as good and bad and think of them as things that help your goal or don't.

Capitalism and socialism became nearly meaningless terms for me for a long time and I think it was helpful. Language has a funny way of delivering ideas when we're not paying attention and most people don't use them in good faith. By taking the talk away from labels and definitions, we can actually begin to see where our paths are better aided together. When you're not sure where to start, look for the helpers. When people tell you to organize it's because when all the dialectics are past, people will still be hungry and in pain. Talking about macro helps define the micro, but the core of what we want is just better lives and "organizing" is the act of reconnection with your human community. It's not about a paternal need for "peace", it's about acting for mutual benefit in a common cause.

I still have not read Marx.