Wow, what a nice self-reflection, congrats sir

It takes genuine courage to confront your own biases and outgrow them, you should be proud

Welcome to the Former Bigots Club! Membership perks include randomly cringing at a memory of past convictions, profound sadness when you see other people stuck in that same pit of hatred and occasionally imposter syndrome making you wonder if you’re really a good person.

Sick personal growth, dude. Love to see it

Abso-fucking-lutely well said. Codos to you for having the strength of character to admit your failings and be able to reflect on them. A willingness to say “I was wrong” without throwing a tantrum or doubling down is sorely needed in this world.

Thank you for sharng this. I really needed to see an example of being decent and growing today.

good on you for escaping your toxic past self.

Congrats on the growth.

They responded over here, but I’ll contribute my own experience.

I think it’s really hard to understand bigoted thinking if you have never been a bigot yourself. There’s a certain emotional logic behind the need to feel superior that all too easily twists your brain into fabricating or accepting bullshit premises. On those premises, you can then build a logical framework to rationalise your hatred. It’s not that the logic itself is necessarily unsound, but even a formally correct conclusion can be false if its premises are.

Essentially, it’s not the route, but the starting point.

If you can suspend your disbelief for the sake of an example, suppose you didn’t believe that climate change was really that serious. There are numerous ways to come to that conviction, but I’ll pick one for the example and say you’re scared of change and it’s more comfortable for your brain to shut out the worries and tell itself it’s another baseless fad.

Regardless of the specific example, I think we agree that people tend to jump on hype trains even if they’re bullshit. There are also plenty of people riding such trains to prominence and success – for recent examples, look at all the AI or Crypto grifters. They exploit the attention a topic gets to capitalise on gullibility. Isn’t it justified to hate Sam Altman, for example?

You might be able to guess the next step from here, because it’s not actually illogical in itself. If climate change is a hoax, the people believing in it are gullible. Those who capitalise on such gullibility are grifters. Under those premises, people who exploit the attention climate change gets to garner fame and prominence are grifters, and it is right to hate them.

The logic is sound enough. The reason the conclusion is false isn’t that the logic is bent, it’s that the premise is. And that premise is sustained by an emotional factor, which is ultimately very human.

The upside is that bigotry can sometimes be broken out of.

In my case, bitterness at my own situation fueled resentment against “SJWs”, whom I perceived as entitled in their demands for accommodation and respect, because I myself didn’t have much support or respect. Petty jealousy, born of misery. Why should I go out of my way to indulge them? Why should they have a better life at my expense?

You might be able to spot the error already, but I took a long time to even get to the point where I could look for it in the first place. I slowly found a few reasonable people among the progressives, then a few more, then eventually many more until I was faced with two contradictions: For one, these people generally seemed respectful, even towards me in my cautious forays into their spheres, instead of the rabid frothing-at-the-mouth keyboard warriors I expected. Secondly, it didn’t actually cost much effort to respect their wishes.

The root error was that they didn’t want a better life at my expense, but to my benefit as well. A more accepting, inclusive world would be more pleasant for me too. They weren’t my enemy. Where I expected a fist, I found an outstretched hand.

That realisation was the start of a painful journey of reprogramming myself. I don’t think I’ll ever be fully done. The best I can do is try to make fertiliser of the pile of shit my past self was. That’s why I write this, in the hope that it will help someone understand their “enemy” a little better. And just maybe, it will help get someone else out of that miserable pit of hatred.

It is taught and conditioned behavior, and that conditioning can be deep. The answer may never get any more satisfying than that.

I’m a middle aged white guy raised in 80s and 90s white conservative america. Looking at somebody trying to do something good for themselves or others and thinking “what a dumbass/asshole” feels as natural as breathing when that’s how the role models in your life have always acted.

And the fun part with that conditioning is that some of the knee-jerk reaction feelings still get sent out from those tangled old neurons.

She’s a prophet. Not in the sense of foreseeing the future via totally-not-hallucinated-visions-which-are-messages-from-god but in the sense of standing at the gate and preaching to people why what they are doing is wrong.

People don’t like being preached.

When you are being preached by people of authority and power, you can’t hate them for that. I mean, you can, but you better - for your own good - not show any resentment about the preaching. Not where they can hear you, at least.

But when a random nobody does that? Time to let all that anger loose! Who are _they to preach to us?

The answer I generally hear as to why people dislike young activists, not just Greta Thunberg, is that they overly simplify problems.

But this is usually an argument put forward by people who over complicate problems as a defense mechanism. If it’s complicated, I don’t have to do anything.

You have to remember that everyone is the hero of their own journey. So when a 90 pound teenage girl says you’re doing a bad job at something, you dismiss her, and when you can’t dismiss her, you villify her so you remain the good guy. You do this because denigrating a teenager takes only slightly more effort than doing nothing, and infinitely less effort than doing the right thing.

The truth of the matter is that nearly every problem is simple. The complicated part is getting everyone on-board with the same solution.

Not op but I can take a stab. How often do we see empty patronizing platitudes from those privileged enough to make them without consequence… often all it is are just words. So much so that when you see someone taking a public stand, especially someone as young as Greta was when she entered the public spotlight, it’s easy to just be a jaded bitter asshole, rolling your eyes at some foreign tween who thinks that she’s going to fix the world’s problems. How naive she is. There’s no way she’s actually going to make an actual impact other than bringing groans from those who would see her fail.

We often hate those who are closest to us we envy for having the conviction that we lack.