Memes

A lot of reading, listening, arguing with people I disagreed with, forcing myself to contend with discomfort, to reexamine my beliefs, trying to disprove what others were saying or writing, and lots and lots of time.

I was already a relatively well-read kid by the time I hit college, and I had some counter cultura approaches to political beliefs (like taking care of people being more important than raw profit), but I was fully invested in the American project and had a ton of unexamined racism, mysoginy, classism, and cultural appropriation that I just replicated without question.

I studied philosophy and my particular path through that degree forced me to develop not only the ability but the respect for the process of arguing something from multiple perspectives equally well (or aspiring to that as best we can). So by the end of college I was committed to taking up the best version of anything I disagreed with so I could understand it better but also to boost my ego so I could defeat it more soundly.

But "no go" zones always bothered me. For example, we studied the classic skeptics Descartes and Hume, but never responded to them once. We simply examined how their skepticism led to the impossibility of knowledge and then just never solved it. Worse, whenever someone used an argument that was sufficiently skeptical, it was met with "well that just leads to solipsism". That bothers me as it's not a refutation. What bothered me more was the position that if anyone used arguments from solipsism that we could just dismiss them as bad faith and ignore what they had to say.

That particular aspect of my path built this sort of vigiliance for these "no go" zones of thought and I saw them popping up all over the place. If a Republican said something, some people would immediately dismiss it without examining it at all, and the same would be true for different people if a Democrat said something. The same was true if a Chinese or Russian report made a claim. The same was true about satanists, communists, addicts, and many others.

These were far more numerous than people arguing strong skepticism. And the positions being discussed didn't threaten all possible knowledge or the existence of reality, but they did threaten deeply held personal beliefs.

So, overtime, when I witnessed someone else saying "well, that's pro-China so it can't be trusted at all", I slowly started to examine these things. And then I found myself saying the same thing - "oh you're a communist, you can't be trusted with anything you say".

That's when I realized I had some built-in problems. And it was about that time I started to question my long held beliefs that I wasn't racist, that I wasn't sexist, that I wasn't mysoginst. And that was really hard. It took years of stop and start, years of resisting the evidence, years of not paying attention because it made me uncomfortable.

But eventually 2020 happened, I was forced to slow down, I had far fewer social connections reinforcing my behavior and beliefs, and the national discourse at the time gave me huge opportunities to "argue it from the other side" and examine what was really going on. And that was a hell of a ride. Anger, depression, rage, resentment, just everything came up. But my commitment to earnest engagement with ideas and reality and facts and history forced me through the process.

There were distinct periods where (1) I believed the USA was the greatest country in the world and also I and most of the people I knew were not racist, mysoginst, and white supremacist, and then (2) the USA was the greatest country in the world with some problems and I can see how I have unconscious racism but I can fix that and I'm not mysoginst or white supremacist and most of the people I know are not either, and then (3) the USA is a pretty bad actor but at least it's better than Russia, China, DPRK, Cuba, Iran, etc and racism is actually a system not a personal moral failing and while I can work against it I have been raised in this way and also wow ok I realize now that mysoginy is insidious and embedded in so many of my ways of relating to the world but I can work on that and then (4) oh wow the US is the evil empire and racism and mysoginy and white supremacy are actually these massive historical processes that I haven't even begun to wrestle with and I actually can't really say anything about them until I really dig in and am willing to be wrong in ways that makes me sick to my stomach....

And my process is still ongoing now, but, this is maybe a long winded story about how I escaped the matrix.