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.