If this is true, I would postulate that only bullies who *consciously* hold anti-bullying values will forget that they've been mean. Or — they don't understand they're being mean in the first place.
I'll unpack my own stuff here.
Because I wasn't always left.
I was raised conservative, in the Bircher-descended Mormon school. The moment I learned truths about the drug war (thank you Peter McWilliams!) I dropped that for libertarianism. As I learned more about the world, my political alignment shifted more towards what aligned with my core values, which actually haven't changed much in 50 years.
My moderate/progressive/liberal phase only began to erode as I saw the far right reveal who they really are — as fascism increasingly came to power and it became impossible to deny.
As a small child, I would sometimes join in to bully other kids as a way to avoid being a target. A kind teacher helped me realize what I was doing, and I stopped, from then on only being a target (but it's not like I learned to stop bullies). Some of my own family who bu
... Show more...If this is true, I would postulate that only bullies who *consciously* hold anti-bullying values will forget that they've been mean. Or — they don't understand they're being mean in the first place.
I'll unpack my own stuff here.
Because I wasn't always left.
I was raised conservative, in the Bircher-descended Mormon school. The moment I learned truths about the drug war (thank you Peter McWilliams!) I dropped that for libertarianism. As I learned more about the world, my political alignment shifted more towards what aligned with my core values, which actually haven't changed much in 50 years.
My moderate/progressive/liberal phase only began to erode as I saw the far right reveal who they really are — as fascism increasingly came to power and it became impossible to deny.
As a small child, I would sometimes join in to bully other kids as a way to avoid being a target. A kind teacher helped me realize what I was doing, and I stopped, from then on only being a target (but it's not like I learned to stop bullies). Some of my own family who bullied me for a very long time have since themselves come to realize this, and have apologized.
I later (my 30s) went through a time of leaning about "invalidation," and the source of my worst behavior stemmed from not believing people who had different experiences of reality. Learning to listen and validate made me more compassionate AND pulled me further left — woke.
From this, I'd say that liberalism is attractive to people who don't realize the degree to which they capitulate to bullies. Their deepest inner values are not in alignment, but their ignorance can make them unconsciously mean at times, and so they "forget" because they never realized in the first place. They can't see how horrid is the behavior of serious bullies, because they're making similar excuses for themselves, and this makes them susceptible to manipulation by cunning fascists.
This is what I call #AbuseCulture 🧵 dice.camp/@johnzajac/115634163…
Every time I post about the collapse of centrist/Liberal ideology that we're living through, in its degraded fascist forms, I lose some liberal followers. C'est la vie.
Dice.camp
