I grew up a liberal, in the modern sense leftist sense of the term. All of my family, friends, teachers & professors, and people near to me I looked up to are liberal.
By reading the works of Austrian Economics, my eyes were gradually opened to real economics and the truth about government. I’ve read dozens of books by writers including Mises, Rothbard, Hazlitt, Hayek, and many others over the past couple of years. Because of this reading, the transformation from my old thoughts to the new has gone a long way - I’ve gone from believing what most liberals do to seeing that we would be better off without any government at all.
That, unfortunately, is by far the easiest thing for me to have changed - my thinking, based on careful reasoning, logic, and challenging the assumptions behind economic theories and theories on gov’t.
What isn’t easy, at all to me, is to know that the way I think and see the world is so different than that of almost everyone I personally know.
I just got off the phone with my brother, who is an extremely driven and upstanding guy (much more than myself) who does his best to do an honorable job in the military, and the conversation, about whether or not to come back from China and go to work in the States, ended with me saying I didn’t want to work for the gov’t because most jobs within it I find morally wrong to hold.
Of course, he came back with “so is the military morally wrong?”, and I said “it depends what it does”..
Needless to say it pissed the hell out of him.
The point of that little story is this: In some ways I feel separate from those I’m closest to, and think they look at me as some crazy guy.
How do you deal with this? How do you go about not alienating the people you are closest to while still holding strong to your ideas? What do you think?
Thanks in advance for any advice.