This wasn't directed at me, but I'm responding because my experiences seem relevant.

I am a person who has radically diverged from my immediate family both politically and culturally. 8 years ago, I was a very left-wing person. Now, I'm a nationalist and a populist, an anti-feminist, and completely devoid of white guilt.

There were two primary catalysts for this divergence:

1. my own catastrophic relationship with a predatory BPD girl, leading me to question everything I had ever been taught about social sexual hierarchies

2. The media going to bat for another BPD girl known as Zoe Quinn, leading me to question every media narrative in existence - past, present, and future

This is the perfect one-two punch for breaking free of indoctrination. A personal trauma shocked me out of the status quo and forced me to seek alternative explanations, and then additional real world events almost immediately confirmed the truth of what I had learned.

Once I saw through one set of lies, I became capable of seeing similar lies everywhere else. This is why the red pill metaphor is so apt. You never turn away from the truth if you came by it honest, through hardship and experience rather than "education".

In the end, it always comes back to education and media. Together, they erect and maintain the mental prison that holds people captive to irrational and evil ideologies. It takes a precipitating event to trigger an awaken from such a coma.

Then you need a place to land. For me, that place has been a moving target, safe for only a few months up to maybe a couple of years before it is inevitably captured or destroyed. We've left a graveyard of forums in our wake at this point. That's the goal of all oppressive systems: to make sure that anyone who manages to unplug will have nowhere safe to go.

I apologise for rambling.

/u/currnet_horror and I don't get along, particularly along ideological lines, but the comparison and contrast may be useful to you.

I used to be "Left Libertarian" a while back, and I've come to realize my own family is damn near Communist.

From a long term perspective, part of my psyche is actually ingrained and abused to take too much responsibility for things that go wrong. My abuse actually taught me to take responsibility for other people's failures. Lo and behold, a woman with BPD was involved in this too.

HMMMMMMMMM

I didn't have a 1-2 punch, for me it was a much slower process. For me, no authority could be trusted because I had been so often been betrayed or predated upon by authority. It got so bad that my defense mechanism wasn't like others who had a technique of "gray rock" or just ditching people; I actually learned how to make my predators run away. Simply put, I promised that instead of burning a bridge that separated us, I'd burn the bridge that we were standing on. Lions don't follow Gazelles into Crocodile infested waters, so let's go swimming!

I'd be left with nothing. No support system at all... but also no predators and distractions. Ironically, I could focus on getting better by putting myself in a theoretically worse situation. I started to actually understand what "worse" really meant. Some things that sound bad, are not as bad as you think when you live through them, and when you do it willingly. That also taught me a bit of long term time preference.

As a result, freedom has always been more important to me than most other things. Horrible freedom is always better than suffocating pleasure. This has worked it's way into my political analysis as well. Every time I saw an established order making critical and dramatic failures (whether it was religion, the military, academia, or the political left) I pulled away. I butted heads. Sometimes I actively subverted the system to the benefit of everyone involved. When you refuse to comply with these failing systems, they sometimes push you out because you're more trouble than you're worth to them (which paralleled my experience with abuse).

The two things that finally deconverted me from the Left (an old Atheism term I'll go over if you want), was a better knowledge of economics, and the recognition that the Social Justice Racket was an industrial scale psychological and emotional abuse system.

I didn't realize it, but I'd believed in Austrian Economics for years before I knew what it was. I understood the concept of "emergent order" in physics, and it reinforces my belief that freedom must be the bedrock of all prosperous systems as it allows for a naturally beneficial order to emerge in the environment without someone at the top trying to install it. Once I understood Austrian Economics as, effectively, just Economics; I realized that order emerging naturally from chaos without coercion is almost always the most beneficial approach to most system. And I mean this in everything from computer programming, to education, to socialization, to natural ecosystems, and so forth.

But the other aspect was the horrifying realization that what I was seeing in the mainstream of every single institution was a form of abuse that I was intimately familiar with. I recognized the emotional abuse tactics. I recognized the predators. I recognized the coping and co-dependency mechanisms, and I was horrified. I was horrified that entire political wings were promoting this. I was horrified that the abuse was funded by international investment banks. I was horrified that academia and culture were pushing it as a moral imperative. I was horrified that social media had gamified the predation of the innocent. I was horrified that billions of dollars in technology and logistics had created a purely evil system. I recognized the similarity to the industrialization of abuse, to what the Holocaust did: the industrialization of murder.

Where me and my family differ is that they never got out of the captivity of these systems. They just became more ruthless, and thereby successful. These systems reward sociopathy. Even though my family butts heads with me politically, they do see me as a bizarrely moral person. As much as they may hate my politics by conditioning, they do instinctively recognize that my morality and principles are sound and important. They actually want me exposed to their kids because they know that they failed at something that I somehow developed: a very strong moral, principled, and virtuous core.

I don't mean to talk myself up as a kind of Jesus or something. The fact that "Good, we'll both die" is a defense strategy I came up with shows that isn't true. But what it shows is that their amorality is so severe, that strong morals of almost any kind are clearly important to them, even if they disagree with my morals.

Where Current_Horror and I fundamentally disagree is that, frankly, he believes in another system that I feel is destined to fail him: ethno-nationalism. To me, he is falling for yet another scam by yet another failed institution, that just happened to be abandoned by the Left in the mid 20th century. To me, he's hoping that there's salvation on this last framework if the right people are in charge. But what I am trying to tell everyone is that there is no salvation. But that's okay, you don't need any. You can actually save yourself.

Our biggest philosophical and mental difference probably lies here:

you need a place to land.

Actually, you don't. In fact, there is no place to land. You have to build a landing place for the future.

We don't have any communities. We don't have a home. These were all destroyed decades ago, many before we were born.

It is our duty as individuals to build those communities. It must be done from scratch. Once we build them, we're not finished. We must then teach our children to do the same, and then they will build their own communities; but this time, they'll have our knowledge in how to do it.

The phrase I've used is: you must build the community that you will be the pillar of.

Once we all do that, we will have a very well built, highly defendable, and mutually supporting structure: a real, no shit, community.

You don't build communities. You build homes, business, and roads to connect them all. The community is an emergent social property from the individual efforts to build those homes, families, and businesses that support each other. A community can't be built by a city planner with a strip mall and some houses next door.

Hopefully, some of us can learn that process in this very forum.

I'll give you a similar one. My brother is a nuts leftist too. I will give him a tiny bit of credit, as he does work a good job and has for a long time seems to not be totally atrocious at raising his kids even. Outside of that, he's all about their Covid stuff and the classical leftist koolaid like racism, free stuff, etc.

My dad is about the same politically as me, maybe a tiny bit less "redpilled" than I am but not by much. Mom is what I call a religious democrat, meaning the way I see it she thinks like a leftist in a lot of ways, but would never support them because of gays and abortion. We both grew up with both parents around. I was the antisocial nerd and he was the social butterfly. I really think this personality difference is a huge part of it. My mother would even tell you I was the stubborn think for himself kid, even to a fault at times. He was a gullible people pleaser, also often to a fault.

Take that personality and add in the fact that his wife is a raging leftist and he's kept up with so many immature leftist friends that never grew up he went to school with, and you have the difference.

Not the person you were responding to but my sister and I are different in just about every way. I think there's an element of both nature and nurture to everyone and that my sister and I both landed in different areas of the nature slider. Add that I'm the older sister who felt responsibility to set a good example and make my family proud, where she was the youngest and wanted to be first at something (thus got into things like boys and drugs at a young age) and you get two girls raised virtually the same but ending up very different people. One takes responsibility and the other needs to stand out so she plays the victim. That sort of thing.

I can also answer this: they sat on their asses while people like me had to pay the bills.

It captured communism and socialism perfectly: middle class working hard only to get heavily taxed to pay for deadbeats to remain deadbeats.

I saw it for the microcosm for what it was and made it my mission to work myself out of that situation. Am still in it, but have established a plan to get out.