This is what my anti communist mom and father-in-law have been telling me. 😂
My father made the mistake of telling me I would become less liberal, instead of more conservative.
He was right, but unaware of the monkey paw curling.
I was always told I’d become less liberal.
To be fair, I guess I did. 🇨🇳 🫡
I don’t know why anti communists always imply that we are going to be less empathetic when we grow older. I wonder if it is just projection from them. Also, happy cake day!
It has more to do with acquiring a stake in the neoliberal status quo. Those who say life makes you more conservative are almost always older white people who stand to personally lose if their privilege goes away.
A worker who spends 40 years throwing their retirement into the stock market (401k) will be less willing to throw that away for a better future for the next generation. Earlier in their career, they may have been more willing to challenge the status quo and their own ideas because they had less to lose.
The bourgeoisie has a strategic interest in keeping western workers in a petty-bourgeois or labor-aristocratic mindset.
They grew up with lead pipes. They literally did become less empathetic. Who knows what the remaining lead and the microplastic will do to us.
society’s values tend to progress faster than individuals. when a conservative boomer says were “progressive” in their youth, probably all that took was not actively cheering for gay people dying of AIDs. most people’s politics stay the same or even shift somewhat left in certain ways as they age
You become more conservative when you stop learning.
For many people, this is the same as getting older - they leave school, they eventually let their passions dwindle, and they stop and say “I want it to stay exactly like it is now, and everything else is modern rubbish”
If you carry on learning about the world, loving, experiencing, following interests and passions, meeting new people, you’ll still get old, but not more conservative.
People becoming more conservative as they age really seems to stem from a combination of political illiteracy, possessing some form of capital and wanting to defend it, and the incentive set of living in capitalism to fuck over everyone for your own gain.
Millennials and Zoomers are generally less conservative because they own squat. Who cares if your home tax is 0.5% higher than last year if you’ll never be able to own a home?
I think a part of it, in the west at least, is the 24 hour news cycle that is constantly fearmongering. Conservatives are reactionary, and the best way to get people to just react instead of act is to freak out the lizard part of the brain and make it think they are constantly under attack.
Once you have kids, you’ll hate them so much that you’ll want to leave them a boiling uninhabitable hellhole of a world.
What’s the ethics of paying Alex Jones to get his fans to boil their nads?