Ask Lemmy

Countless times throughout my life. In fact, a big part of my life is slowly deprogramming from years of propaganda. Whether it is religion or politics the amount of misinformation is enormous as it is prolific.

Even something very personal like relationships is fraught with tons of negative cultural issues around control and love. Most of what society teaches is a lie designed to perpetuate things like the Patriarchy.

Edit: After reading a lot of these I would like to offer an alternative to what a lot of people have said.

I learned about a conspiracy back in the early days of computing that was essentially that the US was intercepting all emails and all phone calls around the world.

There was a lot of good evidence including a spy pact with Canada where we had an installation on their soil and they had an installation on ours so we could spy on our own citizens without breaking the letter of the law.

Also good evidence that AT&T and other providers had let the government access their major server trunks to install their own hardware.

Well Snowden proved it was all real. This was probably the biggest conspiracy theory of my lifetime.

Kony 2012, not the genreal idea of raising awareness about Joseph Kony, but that it would actually lead to his capture.

Pizza party, soccer practice, Christmas, whenever it's served really

Used to believe that humanity would inherently self-improve, especially the more easily information became accessible.

People couldn't read and write at first, and didn't know much about the world, and now we have instant communication and access to vast repositories of knowledge.

I believed that people were naturally curious, and wanted to learn and figure things out. Education systems sucked, but with improvement it could foster that curiosity in everyone!

Turns out that was incredibly naive. Humans have an inherent ego that tries to make themselves more than reality. Their problems are more real than another's. Their inconveniences are more important than anything bigger-picture. I thought religion were old dinosaur structures of primitive belief systems that lasted for too long, but humans will literally make shit up or believe in some made up shit from someone else if it helps them ignore the inconveniences of reality.

COVID-19 really helped sink that in.

There was a time I actually thought that Elon Musk wanted to help save the planet by making electric cars mainstream to displace fossil fuel vehicles, and by helping humanity return to space simply for the science and exploration value.

Musk's "some kind of pedo guy" comment about the diver that dismissed Musk's efforts with the cave children was the first WTF moment, but I wrote that off has him just having a bad day as he apologized later. Musk fighting the COVID lockdown was also more evidence that concerned me. This was all before Elon's embrace of trump and GOP Nazism, and long before Elon's double Nazi salute on national television.

I believed the USA was a liberal democracy full of concerned citizens. I also had faith in the financial system at one point!

I ran 5 km every day and ate very low fat, mostly plants. Ended up with non alcoholic fatty liver.

Apple products through the 2010s.

I'd watch their WWDC presentations online religiously

I believed that I had to be certain way in society or I was fundamentally flawed and bad.

I dropped that belief, acknowledge that to some point it's convenient for me to follow societal norms but trying to fit in makes me mostly miserable. I naturally don't want to do things that bother other people but I also don't really want to be around them so why should I try to be likeable to them any more than is normal to me. This way people who like me, are sure to like me as I am. If I like them enough, I'll naturally also want to be considerate of them, even if I have to occasionally behave a little different.

I somehow made it very complicated with just beating myself up for being bad/stupid/ugly/broken because I kept believing people who I don't even like.

If you work hard, are honest, and moral, you will get ahead in life.

It was embarrassingly late in life before I realized how much of a farce that was.

I was raised evangelical Christian in the Bible belt. I was a "true believer" I call it now. I literally believed there was a hell that people were going to. I'm glad I'm out of that.

Elon Musk in his early days. He was fresh, convincing and his ideas sounded good. It turns out they sounded a bit too good. With hindsight he really is the world greatest con-man. Why this still goes on its beyond me, though.

Divisive propaganda got me to vote for Jill Stein in 2016. I would still assert that Clinton was an awful candidate, but I should have voted for her.

Mine have generally been mentioned. In my early 20s in the early 2000s. Got into the ancient aliens stuff briefly.

Believed in supernatural and past life stuff for a good bit.

By the mid-2000s, having "pulled myself out of poverty" (I didn't do it on my own; I had help and support for family after having been homeless at one point) and gotten a salaried job, started listening to rightwing radio hosts. Thought I just needed to work a bit harder and success would come. All the other people were lazy and social programs were bad with the possible exception of something like WIC. Nah, I was just fairly lucky to have survived some stupid situations, had help from family, and was generally just way too entitled and thinking I was special. I was fairly insufferable for a good while.

I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000

When I was a kid, I watched Chinese dramas about the war of resistance against japanese invasion, and it portrayed the CCP as heroes...

The main fighting force was actually the ROC Army lol

I used to have more positive views on PRC, but then my mom told me about One Child Policy and I wasn't supposed to exist...

so yea, my opinion changed pretty quickly

No way in hell I'd support an organization that wanted to legislate me out of existence, also denying legal paperwork after I was born.

Also, cops.

I used to think they actually protect people, now I know they are just a bunch of useless assholes that sometimes harass innocent people. They never help with anything, always have this aggressive attitude, does injust arrests.

This view isn't based on the internet, it's from actual real life experiences.

Once thought that Google eas a great company and earnt evil.

I was raised insane and religious and ended up listening to Alex Jones every day for a year or two in highschool. I was also insufferable about it.

"I figured out what was wrong with the shell script I just had to update the #!/bin/sh to #!/bin/bash . Using the upgraded bash was a no brainer"

Little did I know my shell script updates were just not posix complaint and used bashisms. Its been nearly a decade and I'm still haunted lol

"Quantum computing is just like regular computing". That one still bothers me.