Ill start. Around 6th grade my sister who is two years my elder started to get into feminism, me being a good person learned about the core values from her and they seemed good. "Equality" "helping people who are in need" ect. Fast forward to probably 8th or 9th grade and i was starting to become disenfranchised with it. I didn't understand why it was FEMinism and not just equality. As i started highschool and more women around me started to join the feminism movement i happily joined their talks and was labeled as one of the "good" men. Unfortunately i began to see the cracks forming in feminisms ideals. i had a women make a false allegation and i was shunned from my community theater, everyone who had been kind saw me as a monster before even getting my pov. (She was upset because i wouldn't bring her alcohol). I was eventually told why people didn't like me at that place but it was to late. I then started dating a self described radical feminism, she would constantly be posting things like "kill all men" "all men are bad" ect. When i called that out she told me it was just a joke. Well i didn't find it funny. We ended up getting in a fight because she told me i couldn't understand the pain women go through from sexual assault and rape. I ended up breaking down and not realizing for the first time but finally confronting the fact that i had been raped by a woman at the age of 4. It was at this point that i started to look for support and learned i couldn't find it in feminism so i moved on, i would say im now more egalitarian but i value MRAs for giving me the ability to see more then feminism.
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I came to political awarenesss in the mid to late 00s and found a place within New Atheism, which believed that religion (to varying degrees) was the source of 'wrong' in the world. The thinking arose due to the political enviroment at the time, Bush being president and claiming to hear God and tied with him, the power that evangelical held in the world's superpower, plus the rise in islamism and the 9/11 attacks.
I watched the culture war between christians and atheists on early Youtube, but the whole worldview seemed to fall apart in the early-mid 10s as Obama was now president and yet a secular utopia didn't come about by putting this the mulatto messiah in control.
The Atheist movement was the first to split in 2011 as their opponent removed themselves from the platform, and so, without an opposing force to identity itself with, it fell to infighting. Atheism+ VS. 'The Skeptics', the former the forerunner to social justice warriors and the latter to the anti-SJWs. This made an ideological schism, but later I will tell you when the movement officially died (at least to me).
It was here that I again watched and participated in a the second culture war between feminists and non-feminists, stumbling on MRA points, but I wasn't as invested as I was in the first one. While I thought MRAs more correct than feminists I saw them, perhaps a bit too late, being just as bitchy as feminists. Not surprising considering they're fighting over the same ideological turf, equality. A principle I would come to reject as you will read.
Throughout the 10s, especially towards the latter part I found myself questioning many of the beliefs I had, like equality being a good.
Of course I had always known that in real life--physical reality--that people weren't equal. Sexual dimorphism makes men and women different and so unequal, evolution shaped different peoples due to their respective environment and so how could they be equal? There are so many, I dare say even pseudo-religious dogma around equality.
(I will say that even here you still hold, to different degree, these dogmas to be true and me challenging them might even be offensive, even with this community being moderately heterodox within leftism:)
"Race is only skin deep!" - No. Why would evolution stop beneath the skin, or beneath the neck? Clearly Leftists are just as unformattable with humans being subject to evolution as conservatives, but, of course, we are subject to evolution.
"Men and women are the same!" - We come to evolution, mankind is a sexual dimorphic species, again equality is a lie.
"Diversity is a strength!" - Again, is this just dogma? Does it make sense that diversity strengthens a country? Honestly I saw, and see, no evidence from this. Intutition tells me the exact opposite, in fact.
"Men can become women!" - Humans are no capable of chaing their sex, and despite the trillion times people have claimed gender is somehow different I still see it as a verbal slight of hand. Why, after all, if sex and gender are different do these people refer to themselves as FtM and MtF (Male-to-Female and Female-to-Male) when male is biology and 'man' is social? Why are the operation they undergo called a sexchange operation? In fact, why is this Procedure required at all if all it takes is merely self identifying as the opposite sex to be the opposite sex? It's all Volapûk, and quite harmful.
Etc.
It's sacred principles, just like Christ's divinity is to christians and the buddha enlightenment is to buddhists.
And it is just as false.
So I abandoned it, little steps along the way. I could not justify it to myself anymore, you see. I was never married to the idea too much to begin with so I expect it was easier for me to do so than others.
Many here likely still believe a great many of these claims, but think the dominant force is just not adhering to them correctly, I.e: feminists are not taking men's problem seriously and so in infraction of 'true' equality.
In many cases, there is a hidden claim within the corpus of leftist approved thought that human's 'true' state is that of equality and inequality is merely due to socialization and if we just tear down this evil influence a utopia will spring up.
But why is equality a good thing in the first place? The universe or God, doesn't demand anything of you, there's no divine mission to equalize. Or do anything, really.
I think I suffer/ed from a form of nihilism, that all the stories we tell ourselves is nonesense, although I found it very freeing. I didn't and dont have to adhere to dogma, be it secular or not.
While I remember it,
Two major incidents also shine in my mind with their effect in me abandonming the identity of a leftist, the Rotherham Gang Rapes which was covered up since the late 90s because it was pakistani immigrant communities targeting white native british girls and the Left's reaction to the Charlie Hebdo Attacks, both came to the forefornt in 15ish, the first made me truly aware of the anti-white sentiments on the left (and the continied march of time have only made it more clear), in truth I always saw them, but thought them on the fringes, and the second I saw as the death nail of New Atheism in the political sphere.
When I tried to draw attention to the Rotherham scandal within leftist forums I was told it was a conspiracy theory and that I was a bigot and I believe it was the first time I was called a reactionary. Clearly Labour were okay with sacrificing lower class white girls in favor the immigrant vote.
Political I have certainly abandoned many leftist stances, although I will, in defense, say that the movement forced me to. Unless you are spineless you will rebel against people that outright demonize you and your people. And there are a ton of anti-white propaganda in America, and a good deal of laws that discriminate against them too. Americans just accept them like they do male genital mutilation, they don't see it as a problem because it is the norm, so they downplay it by calling it a different name or deny it as harmful. Me not being an American, but seeing their soft influence grow, made me more aware of it.
As an outsider certain things seem clearer to you, like you all know this is a forced charade of admiration, but North Koreans will claim it isn't, they might even surfacely believe it themselves.
Still, there are certain aspects that I can still think good that leftism propose; like socialized healthcare, public education and anti-war, most prominent among them combating climate change, but recent years have made these tepid endorsements. Certainly the come with a lot of caveats.
In truth I see leftism as very... How to explain it!?
Here are som scattered thoughts, perhaps they can be synthesized later,
It suffers from a secular form of slave morality, seeing weakness, defectiveness as morally correct and in doing so incentives its adherents to gain victimhood, or lame themselves deliberately to gain the valuable social currency. Add to that and I find many of their causes just outright retarded, like the destruction of the family unit.
The funny thing is that I remember a video floating around where they illustrated social 'privileges' (every lefist's favorite bludgeon) and one of them was being raised in a two-parent household, like, leftists efforts were instrumental in tearing families apart and now you go around accusing the people that didn't do it as an oppressor group? Now they have to be lectured for having to parents that stayed together? Where does this moral superiority come from, you ask? Their righteousness of being a loser: slave morality.
And this behavior of creating bad programs and cultures and then bitching because they don't work is so very typical of leftists too.
If some people are better off they are made evil for being so, AND efforts (often demanded to be from government), must be made to ensure that the thing that made the successful people successful is removed, we must all suffer from the lowest common denominator.
It's a perverse way of thinking that retards productive members of society in favor of giving the losers the illusion of equality.
I thought the story of Harrison Bergeron was a parody of this thinking, but the more time goes on the more it seems to be a real goal.
Of course, just to add hypocrisy to the mix they don't demand the dismantling of systems that put ''their'' groups in the lead (you likely know who these are already without me having to mention them directly).
What shaped this? My guess is that Leftists, at least those that direct it tries to break down soceity in order to build it up right, without the sin of differences and in that I think they are doomed, not in their first part, but in their second surely, This is why they recruit from among the fringes and outsiders and condemn productinve, healthy, sections of the nation(s). It's a bribe, of a type, "help us tear down the power structures and we'll reward you."
Of course in many cases their powerlessness is a fiction, leftists have a stranglehold on many institutions, I would say the majority, barring the military and police.
So where am I know, I dunno. We life in an age of flux and too much information, but I am certainly more conservative than ever before, I fear that many social structures that have been torn down might have been a net positive to society than not and I am certainly more slow to agree to change.
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Reading I found insightful in my drifter period: New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed, The Psychology of Modern Leftism, THE TYRANNY of STRUCTURELESSNESS, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives and What You Can't Say?.
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