In my experience, people don't like to be on the wrong side of an issue. When confronted with evidence, people with reactionary ideas tend to get very angry and go bad faith. I guess that would be the cognitive dissonance playing out. I think we've all seen many a lib get ultra shitty when clear facts are ruining their ideology.
So here's my history:
Around 2020ish and the protests after the George Floyd murder, many BIPOC activists were calling out the bullshit of white and/or men amongst the liberal and left crowds. For a small amount of time, maybe two months, I played around with the ideas of stupidpol and class determinism. I was probably butthurt for being silenced, which doesn't actually really happen anyways. The funny thing was that as COVID went on, it was a masterclass in how terrible white/male progressives are. Also Hexbear became big as lockdowns happened, and my thinking has changed to "white guys fucking suck, and if a marginalised person argues with you, you're better off just shutting the fuck up".
I gotta go way back in time to find the previous instance. When I was maybe 13, before the internet was a thing, I just to get really damn upset at my older sister calling out her brothers' sexism. It was a long ass time ago, but I remember feeling red hot angry at feminists. If 4chan or TikTok existed, it would probably channel me into shitty manoshpere ideals. Thankfully I was mostly occupied with WarCraft2 missions and Sim City. It's far too long ago to remember who was right.
Unrelated to what happened in my teen years, but I'm sad to report that my sister is now an insufferable lib.
I’m sure I’ve got many bad ones, but a couple that come to mind—arguing to my parents while in college that drones were a good thing because they resulted in less casualties.
Also in college, mostly because I was surrounded by neocons-in-training, I occasionally flirted with the idea that the Israel/palestine conflict was a both-sides mess, and that Israel was our important democratic ally on the Middle East. But even then something always subconsciously rubbed, and pretty quick after leaving that world (as the neocons quirky liberal hawk friend) it became logically impossible to square that stuff anymore.
Or maybe the bigger picture was just that I still bought the idea that the US were the good guys and that we were stabilizing the world and spreading democracy… woooof.
I tend to be forgiving to myself on these because I was basically a young idiot, and that’s how it goes. I also feel that all of these stories people are sharing are exactly the point—we learn from our past mistakes and slowly improve our sense of the world, etc. it’s problematic if you aren’t aware of it, or cannot acknowledge it and adjust your thinking, but most growth doesn’t happen perfectly or cleanly, and being kind to yourself, and open to changing your mind are important qualities.
I enjoy the post OP, and also the other commenters’ stories.
I can't stress enough that this and the other things you said were constantly fed to you from birth. It's amazing that people do find their way out of Western chauvinism.
For real. I look back on that and think like, how is it possible, but when you’re young, everything you see and hear mostly supports this basic premise. You have to be out in the world a while before your own observations and interactions start to lead to questions about received info.
I thought of another one: about a decade back I would describe my general opinion about China was pretty bog-standard media take of the time: sorta backwards country with “human rights abuses,” poor and authoritarian, but good manufacturing and food. Chinese “people” didn’t really factor as a thing in my mind, just kind of a mass of indistinct humanity. Mostly I just didn’t directly think about it much.
I got the opportunity to go to Beijing and environs for about two weeks, and, of course, I discover the depth of western propaganda messaging that I had been slurping up. It felt like going to the future. Not all of it was my specific cup of tea, but it was not poor, it was far higher tech than the US, and you could just tell that there was a more community than individual culture. Mass transit was fantastic, brand new high speed rail that made a formerly 14-hr trip to xian 2.5, with more snaking out in every direction or under development. Domestic smartphones selling for more than iPhones. Public bathrooms. Everyone grows vegetables everywhere and the food is so much better than Americanized Chinese cuisine usually is.
Anyhow I could go on and on, it was a really memorable experience, but being there, interacting with Chinese people (guess what? Turns out they’re people like everyone else? Who knew?) just completely blew my old impression out of the water. It made me wish there was more ways for people of different cultures to interact and exchange, because that human connection really defuses a lot of the bullshit tricks that get played on us. I enjoyed seeing that TikTok exodus to the Chinese app last year for this reason.