This is what my anti communist mom and father-in-law have been telling me. 😂
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.
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.
Well, technically conservatives are liberals so that was the only way for him to actually be right
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.
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It may be that faced with overwhelming bourgois societal pressures including the culture of personal capital accumultation and a liberal/fascist education system both formal (schooling) and informal (media; news and entertainment) bends one’s personal worldviews towards a certain arc. Personal material wealth can of course be a factor here but one only needs to look in the west the perspective of some older poor folks and how reactionary they can be despite their experiences. Their experiences are real but they fail to understand the contradictions of their environment.
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However, it is objectively not universally true especially when you consider the bulk of MLs in the west and global south come from backgrounds of bourgois indoctrination.
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I suspect a significant amount of us MLs are labour aristocrats.
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There are many older folks who are leftist educators including more famous ones whose books and articles we have read / reading, whose interviews and videos we listen and watch (I am going to include non-ML here as well because the perspective was people become more conservative as they grow older, this proves that it is certainly not the case)
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“You can’t resist for very long a truth you discover for yourself.” ― Nikolai Chernyshevsky (via Roderic Day)
/edits for clarity
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imagine having kids and wanting them to grow up to be wage slaves for the entirety of their lives to MAYBE, if they’re LUCKY, and ignoring climate change, retire in their late 60s to 70s and MAYBE have a decade or two to relax before dementia and death, all because a perverse system of property ownership and the profit seeking it enables and encourages demands the lion’s share of their lives’ works just to enrich the largesse of the greedy ownership class
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.
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
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.
I’m trans and pretty open to the suspicion that endocrine disruptors in the womb may be the reason for my trans-ness.
Or maybe it just causes me to have acne. Who knows!
my understanding is that older generations tend to be more conservative, but conservatives also tend to come from money which correlates with longer lifespans. so, to a degree, it’s not individuals becoming less progressive as they age, but progressive individuals being less likely to survive into old age.
The assumption previous generations made is that as you get older you will gain more wealth and assets, and so you become more conservative from a desire to protect that wealth.
Except with late-stage capitalism people just stay poor for their entire lives, so this never happens.
I complained about taxes taking a fifth of my paycheck and my dad said I was becoming a conservative lol
Honestly, it’s not the taxes that kill me. It’s what they do with the money.
I’m in my late teens and I’m still a Communist
Late teens? You’re still a baby.
You’ll become more communist.
Once you have kids, you’ll hate them so much that you’ll want to leave them a boiling uninhabitable hellhole of a world.
“i’m conservative”
what do you want to conserve if basically you’re destroying everything?
That’s what I usually ask my family member that are conservative. My anti com mom usually answers that she wants uphold christian values of society(example: anti lgbt and anti abortion). In the case of my father in law, he told me that he wants uphold private property due to not falling in an “authoritarian” regime like Cuba.
It is a mess tbh.
christian values of society
you should tell her that those values would make her unable to express support for those values without being punished
he wants uphold private property due to not falling in an “authoritarian” regime like Cuba
tell him about legal procedures about foreclosing and ask why you can take a property from another person inside capitalism!
same
Plot Twist: You do end up becoming more conservative, but in China where the definition of a “conservative” is a bit different.
heh… I started left and remained left.
I’m on my fifties now so I think I’m safe ;)
