I had noticed for years I was increasingly at odds with "the left" and was experimentally trying to say the unsayable, but I was still hoping to reform "the left".
...maybe what what broke for me last week was realizing that I have more hope in "the right" as a starting point.
once I no longer had to rationalize perceiving "the right" unfavorably for the circular argument reason of "they're bad so we shouldn't elect them" I realized that I actually agree with most of their concerns (fewer of the proposed solutions)
notice how in response to this tweet—which I resonate with A LOT and is the OG Liberalism that I'd been hoping for years "the left" would do—there are multiple replies with 500 likes each saying "this is the current republican stance as I see it"
x.com/mattyglesias/status/1856293919916531743this experience has been really trippy. I've experienced breaking my worldview out of a totalizing frame before but mostly only on the level of a small intentional community that uses the good part of cult tech w/o exploitative bs. but this is...
x.com/lumpenspace/status/1846751213611848189I was confusing some ambient loyalty I had to whatever called itself "progressive" (a word which when I was a teen was nearly synonymous with "good" in my head) with loyalty to the values that I want us to actually progress towards?
the trippy thing, I think, is that if I knew what I knew now, on a structural level not about this particular situation (like learning from a breakup)
then I would have been able to predict this shift 👇 a few years ago (for me and others)
x.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1856835904004088252but on some level I did predict? I tweeted this, about people saying math was racist. it was scary to tweet, even tho so obvious. fucking chilling effects.
< too far tweet >
maybe I had this implicit idea that switching teams was somehow a form of losing? sometimes is.
it's trippy because I didn't even realize I had thought I was ON a team. that's part of what's so weird about it. relates to SSC's ingroup, outgroup, fargroup thing, I guess? idk!
I don't know how to feel about all this!
I am pretty sure that I don't intend to form a loyalty to a party (I didn't have one before; am Canadian and have voted for lots of different parties there)
but a loyalty is different from a starting point
x.com/Austromum/status/1856619156595937546a cut-off line in tweet below is "but then obscures other things obvious to you".
I'm concerned about aspects of reality I may lose (or have already lost) as my worldview rotated to keep in contact with other things I care about. I want those too
x.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1672338596139769856I see worldview-change very descriptively, like it just happens in accordance with shifts in experience, power, friends, and many other things
you will have, at any given moment, whatever worldview(s) make the most sense given all of that
so if you feel like people are confused, you need to find a worldview that explains things better than their one does, and bring them in contact with it, and reassure them that people will still like them if they abandon their old one. some mix of those. goes for left and right and cults.
and that's why I'm sharing my thoughts out loud here