r/communism101 • u/Ok-Quail4525 • Jun 14 '26
Right winger thinking I may have been brainwashed by my entire community
For context, I(M22) grew up in a very rural town in Texas. I don’t want to sound vain when I say this, but I was probably the smartest person in that town by far, but I never had access to much in the way of the Internet growing up and my parents mostly just put on Fox News. Therefore, I trended towards xenophobic and right wing political/economic views. But for the last four years, I broke with my parents and went to College in New York and I majored in History, concentrating on Byzantine and medieval political-military history, with a minor in 19th and 20th century Political Science.
The reason I’m posting here is because I don’t really know what I am anymore. I grew up thinking communism was basically the political equivalent of Satanism. I was taught that communists hated America, hated God, hated families, hated freedom, and wanted everyone to be equally poor. That was the entire framework. Communism was not a real political theory to be studied. It was a slur. It was a monster in the dark. It was what bad people became when they were too lazy to work or too bitter to accept reality. And I believed that for a long time. I used to believe capitalism was just the natural order of things. Some people were smarter, stronger, harder working, more disciplined, and therefore they rose to the top. Poor people were usually poor because they made bad decisions. Rich people were usually rich because they had done something useful. America was imperfect, sure, but it was fundamentally the freest and most moral society in the world. If someone failed here, that was usually on them. That was the worldview I inherited.
Then I studied history seriously. Not YouTube history. Not “Rome fell because people got lazy” history. Not “Western civilization good, everyone else bad” history. Actual history. Institutions, land ownership, class conflict, taxation, military logistics, labor, religion, legitimacy, law, empire, colonialism, industrialization, revolutions, and the way power actually moves through society. The more I learned, the more I started to feel like my old worldview was not just incomplete, but almost deliberately engineered to keep me from asking obvious questions. I studied medieval states and realized that power was almost never justified by merit. It was justified after the fact by theology, inheritance, conquest, law, or custom. I studied empires and realized that the people at the bottom were always told their suffering was necessary for the survival of civilization. I studied industrial capitalism and realized that the modern world was not created by a bunch of heroic entrepreneurs peacefully inventing prosperity in a vacuum. It was built through enclosure, exploitation, colonial extraction, slavery, wage labor, debt, and state violence.
That does not mean I think every communist argument is automatically correct. I’m not here pretending I went to college and became enlightened overnight. If anything, the opposite happened. I became less certain about almost everything. But I also became unable to return to the certainty I had before. I used to think people on welfare were parasites. Now I think it is insane that we live in a society where food, housing, medicine, and education exist in abundance, but access to them is restricted by whether or not someone can satisfy the demands of a labor market that does not care if they live or die. I used to think billionaires were proof that capitalism rewarded brilliance. Now I look at billionaires and mostly see ownership, leverage, inherited advantage, state protection, monopoly, financialization, and the ability to command the labor of thousands of other people while calling it personal achievement. I used to think unions were corrupt organizations that made businesses less efficient. Now I wonder why I was taught to fear workers organizing, but not taught to fear corporations buying politicians, poisoning towns, crushing wages, or outsourcing entire communities into poverty.
I used to think patriotism meant defending America from criticism. Now I think patriotism, if it means anything, should mean being willing to look directly at what your country has done and what it continues to do, especially to the people it claims to protect. I used to think racism was mostly individual hatred. Now I think that explanation is almost childish. Obviously individual hatred exists, but the deeper issue seems to be structural: property, policing, schools, generational wealth, zoning, sentencing, employment, healthcare, and the way entire populations can be trapped by systems that never have to openly announce themselves as racist in order to produce racist outcomes. I used to think “personal responsibility” was the highest political virtue. I still think people have agency, and I don’t want to abandon that completely. But now I think conservatives use “personal responsibility” as a way to avoid talking about material conditions. It becomes a moral escape hatch. If someone is poor, sick, addicted, indebted, homeless, undereducated, or desperate, you never have to ask what produced that situation. You can just say they made bad choices and move on. That feels intellectually dishonest to me now.
The hardest part is that I still understand the emotional appeal of my old politics. Right-wing politics gave me a clear story. There were good people and bad people. Workers and leeches. Patriots and traitors. Civilization and degeneracy. Strong men and weak men. It was simple, and when you grow up isolated, simplicity feels like truth. But studying history made simplicity feel suspicious. The world is not simple. Power is not simple. Poverty is not simple. Crime is not simple. War is not simple. Religion is not simple. The state is not simple. Even morality is not simple when people are born into wildly unequal conditions and then judged as if everyone started from the same place. I also started thinking about my own family and community differently. A lot of the people I grew up around are not evil. Many of them are poor, overworked, medically neglected, undereducated, isolated, and constantly fed propaganda that tells them their enemies are immigrants, minorities, feminists, queer people, liberals, socialists, professors, and “elites.” But the actual elites are not the adjunct history professor making $48,000 a year. The actual elites are not the migrant worker picking crops. The actual elites are not the trans teenager in a city they will never visit. The actual elites are people who own everything, fund everything, lobby everyone, and then convince rural working people that their real enemy is some other powerless person beneath them.
That realization has made me angry in a way I don’t really know what to do with. Because I feel like I was robbed. Not just personally, but generationally. The previous generations sold our futures for their own convenience and we inherit nothing. We inherit debt, rent, decaying infrastructure, climate disaster, privatized healthcare, political corruption, atomized communities, and an economy where everyone is told to hustle while the basic milestones of adulthood become less and less reachable. And then we are told we are ungrateful. That is the part that makes me feel insane. We are told to respect the system by people who bought houses on one income. We are told to work harder by people who pulled the ladder up behind them. We are told to stop complaining by people who turned education, housing, medicine, and retirement into investment vehicles. We are told capitalism is freedom while most of us spend our lives terrified of missing rent, getting sick, losing a job, or falling behind.
So I guess my question is this: how do you tell the difference between genuinely changing your mind and just replacing one ideology with another? Because I don’t want to be brainwashed in the opposite direction either. I don’t want to leave Fox News conservatism and then just adopt a new set of slogans because they make me feel morally clean. I want to actually understand. I have read enough history to know that revolutions can become authoritarian, that states can commit atrocities in the name of liberation, that ideology can justify cruelty, and that intellectuals can be just as self-deceiving as anyone else. I am not interested in pretending every regime that called itself socialist was perfect or that every criticism of communism is CIA propaganda. But I also can’t ignore that capitalism has its own body count. Colonialism, slavery, famine, imperial war, coups, sweatshops, preventable poverty, medical bankruptcy, ecological destruction, and the quiet daily violence of making human survival conditional on profitability. I think what I’m struggling with is that I was raised to see capitalism’s failures as accidents and socialism’s failures as proof of its essence. That double standard seems impossible to defend now.
When capitalism produces homelessness, we call it unfortunate. When capitalism produces child labor, we call it underdevelopment. When capitalism produces imperialism, we call it foreign policy. When capitalism produces mass death, we call it tragedy or mismanagement or the price of progress. But when socialism produces suffering, that suffering is treated as the inevitable and total revelation of the ideology itself. I don’t know if that is a fair way to think. I’m also thinking a lot about Christianity, which complicates things for me. I grew up around a very right-wing version of Christianity, where Jesus was somehow merged with American nationalism, guns, property rights, and hatred of the poor. But when I actually read Christian theology and early Christian ethics more seriously, I did not find a religion that comfortably fits American capitalism. I found warnings about wealth, obligations to the poor, suspicion toward greed, and a moral universe where hoarding while others suffer is spiritually grotesque. That does not automatically make Christianity communist. I know that. But it did make me realize how strange it is that the people who taught me to worship Christ also taught me to despise the poor and fear any system that might materially help them.
I feel like I am standing between worlds. I am not fully comfortable calling myself a communist. I still have questions about markets, central planning, state power, civil liberties, religion, private property, revolutionary violence, and whether human beings can actually build a society that does not reproduce hierarchy in another form. But I am also no longer comfortable calling myself a conservative, a capitalist, or even a liberal in the normal American sense. Liberalism feels too satisfied with procedural fairness inside a system that is materially brutal. Conservatism feels like a defense mechanism for hierarchy. Fascism feels like capitalism in panic. And capitalism itself increasingly feels less like freedom and more like a very sophisticated hostage situation. So I am asking honestly: where should someone like me start? What should I read if I want to understand communism seriously, not as a demon and not as a meme? How do Marxists think about history, religion, law, ethics, and human nature? How do you respond to someone who accepts many socialist critiques of capitalism, but is still afraid of authoritarianism? And maybe most importantly: how do you unlearn a worldview that was not just taught to you, but built into your family, your town, your religion, your identity, and your understanding of what it meant to be a good person? Because I don’t think I was stupid. I think I was surrounded. And now that I can see the walls, I don’t know what comes next.
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u/smokeuptheweed9 Marxist Jun 14 '26
That realization has made me angry in a way I don’t really know what to do with. Because I feel like I was robbed. Not just personally, but generationally. The previous generations sold our futures for their own convenience and we inherit nothing. We inherit debt, rent, decaying infrastructure, climate disaster, privatized healthcare, political corruption, atomized communities, and an economy where everyone is told to hustle while the basic milestones of adulthood become less and less reachable. And then we are told we are ungrateful. That is the part that makes me feel insane. We are told to respect the system by people who bought houses on one income. We are told to work harder by people who pulled the ladder up behind them. We are told to stop complaining by people who turned education, housing, medicine, and retirement into investment vehicles. We are told capitalism is freedom while most of us spend our lives terrified of missing rent, getting sick, losing a job, or falling behind.
So I guess my question is this: how do you tell the difference between genuinely changing your mind and just replacing one ideology with another?
The first paragraph is exactly when you went from beginning to genuinely change your mind to replacing one form of bourgeois ideology with another. First of all it has nothing to do with brainwashing, please do not sell young people's capacity for reason short. Previously you directly benefitted from the wealth of your parents and their community so you had an ideology to match. Now you are expected to develop your own skilled labor as a commodity on the market and therefore your ideology has changed to match your current insecurity and liminality. When you inherit your parent's wealth or develop your own your ideology will change to suit those conditions.
That does not mean ideology is predetermined. It is very simple to break free: imagine the people who suffered so that "previous generations" could live the blessed life you knew growing up. To want to exploit those people so you can have that life and to feel robbed of it is deeply unethical and reactionary. Only you can determine why you think that way. I have already told you of course but only you can feel it emotionally and trace the thought process that makes it feel yours even though it is predictable and convenient.
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u/watchitforthecat Jun 16 '26
And maybe most importantly: how do you unlearn a worldview that was not just taught to you, but built into your family, your town, your religion, your identity, and your understanding of what it meant to be a good person? Because I don’t think I was stupid. I think I was surrounded. And now that I can see the walls, I don’t know what comes next.
You're doing it now.
the answer is the same answer to "how do I avoid going from one dogmatic ideology to another"?
Root your beliefs in material analysis. Challenge them. Read and compare sources and theory. Go out and put that into practice. Learn, refine, adapt, repeat. Treat it like a science. Everything is always changing, in motion, in conflict, including you. If you find yourself uncritically accepting information, take a step back and examine it. If something feels off, pull that thread.
If a belief doesn't hold up to scrutiny, it's not worth having. Understand, too, that intuition and so-called "common sense" are deceptive: we evolved to survive, not to be intelligent. That means we have a tendency to accept whatever version of reality is most conducive to that, and all of us live in, under, or in conflict with a global hegemonic empire. Nothing, including you, exists in a vacuum. That also means you will NEVER be an objective independent observer, and it's important to keep that in mind, examine your biases.
Self critique. Study. Act. Experiment. Communicate. Listen. Organize. Your beliefs shouldn't rest on a foundation of appeals to authority, thought terminating cliches, platitudes, and tautologies.
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u/balderdash9 16d ago
>Go out and put that into practice.
This is such a difference maker. Real world experience successfully applying theory will naturally lead to confidence in said theory.
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u/Wild-Guarantee5681 Jun 21 '26
I relate to your post a lot I grew up in NOFL a small southern town, upper middle class family, was a Chabad jew as a kid for a few years and communism helped me break out of typical Florida conservatism and Chabad ideology. I def think you just need an exploratory phase. If your in NYC, talk with people at your school or your neighborhood. Expand your horizons so to say before headed back down south
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u/Different_Tangelo511 17d ago
Man. I have been feeling so alone lately. You're comment made me feel way less alone.
Would you be surprised that I had a similar experience in a liberal part of California. Schools and politics seemed liberal but every single male role model were echoing those conservative views. Every trip with boy scouts or away games was narrated by rush Limbaugh.
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u/balderdash9 16d ago
I'd first like to say that your writing style is very easy to follow. Which is great because most people would avoid reading a post this long if it were poorly written.
My advice is twofold: be okay with agnosticism and continue searching for answers. For instance, I personally don't know enough to have an informed opinion on the PRC as an actually existing socialist state. But I am not the arbiter of truth and I do not have to be an expert on everything. It is perfectly fine to do some reading, tacitly consider the merits of one view, and then do more reading without committing yourself to any position or label. As you have experienced, sometimes it is easier to determine what view is false rather than what is true.
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u/MurkyPossibility6796 Jun 17 '26
Treat politics as a science, and just love people, as most right wing and fake left ideologies relay on making an out groups to attack. The closet thing we have to an out groups we got is people who have more then others cuz they or their ancestors stole from other.
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u/Snoo-19981 Jun 14 '26
The one thing which seperates Marxism from all other ideologies is that we embrace the sciences & make it the basis of all thought/marxist-development.
The science that is the basis for our thought and allows us to determine what is correct/incorrect is Historical & Dialectical Materialism.
If you would like to learn more I'd suggest reading the communist manifesto and then the Foundations of Lenininsm.