I’m at such an intersection of privilege that I don’t think I considered politics in any meaningful way until my early 20s when I got hit with the libertarian propaganda and realized that maybe the police and army are political actually.
I always hear of people doing such great work and being so political in their teenage years ago I wonder if it’s more common for someone to not engage in politics until adulthood line myself or if it’s truly just my position in life that allowed me to be ignorant for so long.
I remember buying a shirt with “fuck politics I just want to burn shit down” when I was around 17 and honestly edginess was I think my entire ideology at the time
I’d say I began my political journey in high school. Went through the “classical liberal” phase, was an anarchist for a while, then a weird pseudo ultraleft/cooperative focused “Marxist,” then finally settled around ML, more accurately ML-MZT/XJT. The biggest accelerant to my political journey was working in an industrial environment right out of college, that ended up driving me to genuinely take theory more seriously.
I don’t think I knew anything about terms like anarchy beyond symbols and things said in media. Like I would draw the anarchy “A” on stuff because I thought it looked cool. I never went to college which is where I presume a lot of people first encounter politics as a separate thing
Yep, fair enough! Getting into politics is usually either out of necessity, or exposure to those who are already into politics. My first exposure to an ML was in high school, which was also when I first started genuinely grappling with my coming atheism, so even though I rejected ML (then) it pushed me more into politics. In college it was more of an exposure to anarchism thing.