Great! Now what do you say if I tell you I agree with him?
Come on, Biggy. We’ve been over this. You know I understand how all this stuff is rooted in dasein. You’re just too much of a contrarian to accept that.
Yikes! I’m not gonna go that far!
But I take your point. Your interest revolves around how I (him, they, we) got to where I am today, with the political prejudices I have. The question is: how did I get to the point of being a trucker convoy supporter. Right?
I don’t know where to begin as we could go all the way back to my birth, but everything between then and April 26 2014 is quite uninteresting and frankly irrelevant. But on April 26 2014, I started my Reforming Democracy thread. My frame of mind at the time? I was a leftist without even knowing it. What I mean is, like most people who are uninterested in politics and oblivious to current affairs, I was a perfect subject for MSM brainwashing. And because MSM has had a unambiguous agenda to brainwash consumers with left leaning information and values since at least 2010, and most likely long before, my mind had been molded since as far back as I can remember into the perfect conduit for leftist philosophy. But to me, at the time, I didn’t recognize it as left leaning philosophy–they never prefaced it with any “trigger warning”–it just seemed like “common sense”, like “what everybody knows”, like what I could take for granted. So going into Reforming Democracy, I never thought the views and ideas I would express in that thread would be controversial, or come up against opposition, in the least (at least the ones I thought I could take for granted). ← This is what I mean by uninteresting and irrelevant… there isn’t much to explain except that I had, all my life, allowed the media to brainwash me.
But the thread Reforming Democracy opened my eyes to a wide range of alternative views that I never thought anyone actually took seriously, and as this was my first attempt to dig deep into political philosophy (and political reality), I encountered people and views that I didn’t realize existed and were so widespread.
The thread lived for a good 2 years, and it went through 3 phases. Phase one (April 26 2014 to June 22 2014) was characterized more or less by what I would expect out of a threaded named Reforming Democracy. We hashed out ideas and possible solutions to the problems of corruption in politics. At some point, Uccisore, Eric_The_Pipe, and lizbethrose joined the conversation and that’s when I noticed the theme of conservatives vs. liberals (mainly between Uccisore (the conservative) and Liz (the liberal)), and on June 22, I asked this question:
https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=185699&hilit=preamble&start=225#p2476730
Phase two (June 22 2014 to November 1 2014) was me learning from these 3 about conservatism and liberalism. Believe it or not, I was completely oblivious to these philosophies up to this point. Sure, the terms “conservative” and “liberal” rang a bell–I remembered them from high school social studies–but I was very fuzzy on what they meant. Uccisore, Eric (another conservative), and Liz educated me. I have Ucci and Liz to thank for enlightening me about the political aspects of these philosophies and Eric for the economic and legal aspects. They helped flesh out and solidify these concepts for me, and I came out the other side agreeing with conservatism. I also came out seeing the problem of corruption in politics as not a problem between the government and the people but between factions–that is, between Republican politicians and liberal citizens, and between Democrat politicians and conservative citizens. In other words, when someone calls out the government on charged of corruptions, it’s almost always a conservative calling out a Democrat or a liberal calling out a Republican. As far as the party that conservative or liberal voted for, they can do no harm (and you might rightfully guess that this injected a huge dose of skepticism on my part towards charges of corruption–is it real corruption or business as usual?).
Ultimately, I came to understand the conservative position to be summed up in terms of the American Constitution: the constitution is the best recipe for optimal government–limited and as free of corruption as possible–and with the exception of a few amendments, this is what they are trying to “conserve”. So on November 1 2014, I announced that I was taking the thread in a new direction–an in depth look into the American Constitution:
https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=185699&hilit=preamble&start=750#p2504294
This lasted until Oct 11 2015 when I finally got through the last of the amendments. Despite having learned a ton through each phase, the thread as a whole left me incredibly cynical, the most cynical I’d ever been about democracy and the state of corruption in American politics (and Western politics generally). Any hope I might have previous had for reforming democracy had, at this point, been blown to smithereens. So I gave America a scathing review, predicting much of the chaos and breakdown of society we saw in 2020, and (more or less) cursed it: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 0#p2592419. The thread continued beyond that point, and I continued to contribute, but for all intents and purposes, it was dead.
One of the most destructive effects the thread had on me was it left me incapable of believing anything I got from the media (not just mainstream but any source that wasn’t just my senses). The phrase I coined to express this was “the information pool is contaminated”–meaning that if you poison just one corner of the pool, it won’t take long before the entire reserve is contaminated. You see, before coming to this insight, I held to the phrase “a few bad apples don’t spoil the bunch”… but they do. A spoiled apple will eventually spread its mold to the rest of the bunch until they are all rotten to the core. I learned that because all sources of information originate from a human being, a human being who, by his very nature as a human being, CANNOT be impartial, and to one extent or another, has skin in the game, he will have a motive, to a certain degree, to spin the information in his favor. Drawn to its logical conclusion, I learned that this meant I could never know whether the information I was getting was objectively true through-and-through or was tainted with bias or plain falsehoods. Thus began a phase in my life of extreme skepticism, a phase in which I set the bar extremely high in terms of the criteria I would accept for believing something. The only thing I would allow myself to believe (to call knowledge) was what I saw with my own two eyes.
This skepticism remains today, but until recently, I at least was able to remain relatively centered in my political opinions about what I saw or read–that is, skeptical of both the left and the right–though I still favored the conservative right at least in principle–that is, what the right stood for–but as far as the information I was being fed, neither side won favor with me.
Then came July 1 2018–the day I quit drugs and alcohol. Youtube became a replacement. That is to say, I started watching youtube videos to kill the boredom and the deadly silence that comes with living alone. I wasn’t specifically looking for political videos but somehow the youtube algorithm got me hooked on them. That’s when I really started paying attention to what was happening in the world. And it really shocked me how much Ucci and Eric were right (specifically about the universities, journalism and Hollywood being a cesspool of the most corrupt lying leftist Marxists you can imagine–it sounded like a crazy conspiracy theory at the time, but there it was on youtube–a well known fact according to the sources I was being fed). The more I watched, the harder it became to refrain from taking a stance on either the left or the right side. It was a real struggle of cognitive dissonance–do I continue to stick to my impartial stance of strict skepticism, or do I fall for the brainwashing and allow myself to be consumed by the right? I really wanted to take a side–the “right” side–and I found that as much as I wanted to formally stick to my guns and claim that none of it counted as knowledge (all just hearsay), emotionally I was powerless to resist. I felt like an intellectual whore spreading her mental legs to allow whatever disease ridden filth to inseminate her mind. And I was addicted to it. I kept coming back for more. I had to settle on explaining my position thus: I don’t claim to know any of the stuff I feel strongly about, but I certainly believe it on faith. And most recently, especially with this Freedom Convoy, I kinda just threw my concerns about knowledge out the window and accepted that faith is good enough.
And that brings me to today, to this discussion. I really do wish I could somehow know what the truth is, but I’m so far convinced that what I see on youtube is really going on that I don’t really give a damn anymore. Youtube keeps wanting me to watch clips from Fox News, and I know they have their fair share of information twisting tactics, but I don’t think they’re nearly as corrupt as, say, CNN or The Washington Post or The New York Times. I don’t think Fox News outright lies like the latter news sources do, but they will do things like give you partial truths, or will tell you when the left has done something evil but will never tell you when that evil has been undone or punished (keeps the viewer enraged or scared), and of course, is never shy about sensationalizing their stories with emotional rhetoric and clearly subjective opinions (though I don’t think they deny this). But a lot of what I watch is direct first-hand footage of the things going on in the world, so unless it’s being tampered with by some fancy video editing software or its all actors and special effects, I tend to trust it.
So to bring this full circle–the truckers–I support their cause and believe in what they’re doing because they’re fighting an extreme left-leaning authoritarian government–their enemy is my enemy–and I don’t trust Fauci’s inconsistent science as it seems to serve the interests of authoritarians and Big Pharma, and frankly it just reeks of pretentious acting. I got to this point through the path I outlined above–starting as a moderate lefty (without knowing it) and then being persuaded by the conservative views of Eric and Ucci, and finally, after quitting drugs, by the real world events I see on youtube.
How’s that?