Mental Health

Yeah, deprogramming is hard. People who grew up in progressive homes don't realize how privileged they are in that regard. Imagine if the worldviews you've learned and internalized since childhood were all healthy, balanced, and humanistic.

It's really hard as someone who has to make a deliberate effort to deprogram from a conservative childhood environment to enter progressive spaces without any degree of familiarity with the social scripts and faux pas that come so intuitively to seemingly everyone else. Everyone thinks that your language and mannerisms are all conservative-coded, they assume you're dogwhistling and being disingenuous because the vocabulary and even the inflection you've internalized just sounds "right-wing" to them, even when you're trying to learn how to be more progressive. It's like learning a whole new dialect, except you're under constant pressure to never default to your original one, and if you don't immediately grasp everything you're supposed to and all the layers of subtext and nuance, then everyone treats you like you outed yourself as a closet conservative, and you become a social pariah.

There's honestly kind of an essentialist outlook hiding in that. This supposed belief that anyone born and raised conservative is a conservative for life and can never be redeemed, has to be rejected and ostracized even if they make a genuine effort to learn better. It's really self-destructive to be honest.

One time I did a decent job of convincing people I was a progressive, until I mentioned that I had a conservative upbringing and have some ideas about how to reach people in similar situations who might defect to the left. And then I got skewered for "defending conservatives" and my reputation never recovered...

Like this is what I mean when I say echo chambers aren't a good strategy, but people react as if I mean we should tolerate conservative worldviews, ignorance, and hate. When that's not what I mean at all, just that some "conservatives" are trapped in that mentality, mostly held in by fear of the unfamiliar (which rejecting them outright only reinforces), and might be salvageable if we reach out a hand and show them a way out of that dark place, give them the community and acceptance that they crave so they don't default to toxic spaces where so many of them end up being radicalized.

People tend to think I'm saying we should forgive and befriend the far-right, but what I'm actually saying is that we should reduce their recruitment pool and stop doing their jobs for them by sending so many social rejects and malcontents their way.