mugged by reality

read this former liberal's account of his ideological change. two interesting quotes:

(no one) was ever as young or angry as me. I marched, I chanted and I rioted; I ‘rejected’ this, I ‘resisted’ that and I ‘reclaimed’ the other; I would protest at the drop of a hat, at each and every opportunity and regardless of whether I understood – or cared about - the issues; I talked loudly about Karl Marx in bus queues; I used phrases like ‘capitalistic patriarchal hegemonic discourse’ and urged people to ‘subvert the dominant paradigm’ - all with an entirely straight face and only the vaguest idea of what it actually meant ... I regarded anyone who had the gall to disagree with my political opinions as either mentally ill or irredeemably evil; I honestly thought that Noam ‘the discredited linguist’ Chomsky possessed one of the keenest analytical minds of all time and if The Guardian had run an article claiming that the moon was made of green cheese I’d doubtless have believed that as well.

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Something I often think about when looking back is that my periods of radicalism always seemed to occur alongside my periods of excessive drug use. I certainly don’t think that was a coincidence; you needed to chug down some seriously primo **** to believe the nonsense that I did.