I may have some personal experience with a full blow leftist.
My older brother is unfortunately one of them. He is unhappy in his marriage, his health and his job and blames society for all of that. His dream society would be one were he can stay and read all day, not have to work, his wife doing everything. For some reason he thinks that communism and woke ideology would solve every one of his problem.
He somehow believes that under communism he does not have to work, despite the fact that under communism everyone worked. He also believes that he must be "on the gender spectrum" so he does not have to work towards a masculine ideal and be an actual husband and an actual father.
What he hates is people proving him wrong, people who work hard, workout, strive to be good husbands and fathers and are happy about it. So he likes any ideology that would hurt the average guy.
/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.
Emergence, as a mathematical concept, can actually be modeled in computer programming. Typically involving AI.
The first example you could use is something like "The Game of Life". The first thing it introduces you to is the idea that highly complex systems can develop from extremely simple rules. You set baseline parameters, and things can grow wildly and in highly unexpected ways, even to the point of a permanent pattern developing.
That can show you that an order can emerge without the strict imposition of all patterns from a programmer ahead of time.
From there, if we try to ask a computer to model a most optimal function through trial and error, and we give it the ability to identify which result was "best" so that it can be carried on to the next series of tests, as time progresses the computer will create a highly efficient model to do what we ask, even if the behavior is totally unexpected and/or wouldn't have been programmed.
This is how most AI Learning works by giving a computer a set of objectives, and trialing them out.
I may have some personal experience with a full blow leftist.
He somehow believes that under communism he does not have to work, despite the fact that under communism everyone worked. He also believes that he must be "on the gender spectrum" so he does not have to work towards a masculine ideal and be an actual husband and an actual father.
What he hates is people proving him wrong, people who work hard, workout, strive to be good husbands and fathers and are happy about it. So he likes any ideology that would hurt the average guy.
So how did you turn out differently from your brother?
I am very interested in people who come from the same (or similar) situations, and yet end up on opposite sides of the spectrum.
/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:
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.
Would you kindly elaborate?
Sorry for the late response.
Emergence, as a mathematical concept, can actually be modeled in computer programming. Typically involving AI.
The first example you could use is something like "The Game of Life". The first thing it introduces you to is the idea that highly complex systems can develop from extremely simple rules. You set baseline parameters, and things can grow wildly and in highly unexpected ways, even to the point of a permanent pattern developing.
That can show you that an order can emerge without the strict imposition of all patterns from a programmer ahead of time.
From there, if we try to ask a computer to model a most optimal function through trial and error, and we give it the ability to identify which result was "best" so that it can be carried on to the next series of tests, as time progresses the computer will create a highly efficient model to do what we ask, even if the behavior is totally unexpected and/or wouldn't have been programmed.
This is how most AI Learning works by giving a computer a set of objectives, and trialing them out.