The One Thing That Bothers Me About 'Progressives'

Even as a staunch/instinctive leftist, there is one facet of progressivism, as a concept, that bothers me, especially in view of my accute mental illnesses (i.e. OCD and Anxiety), which I suspect is as bad if not worse for a lot of people on the Autistic Spectrum, and that's how shallow progressivism is as a concept. By its very nature, it's all about changing/adapting to circumstances, and thus disregarding everything one believed/thought they knew about the world.

Now, there's a lot of positives to such thinking, including sophistication, maturity and adaptability, but the ability to essentially snap from one way of thinking to another is, arguably, very shallow (which perhaps explains why so many 'celebrities' at least *feign* 'progressive' beliefs, since La La Land is not known for its sincerity and depth of feeling). For people whose whole life is defined by material success (i.e. wealth, status, image, popularity, career advancement) it's no doubt very easy to glide from one way of thinking to another (without really believing anything; hence the large number of sex-offending 'feminists' among supposedly 'liberal' celebrities and politicians), but for many of us, *especially* those of us who have neurodivergent conditions or mental illnesses, that makes it very hard for us to deal with cognitive dissonance, it can be extremely hard to repudiate everything we'd been raised/conditioned to believe for years/decades. And that's largely down to depth-of-feeling. If one feels something particularly strongly (i.e. one isn't the type to live by the old Groucho Marx line "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them...well I have others"), it's much harder to learn to feel *something else* (which also goes to why it's SO important to raise children with the very values, including compassion, charity, non-sexism, non-racism, tolerance etc we hope they'll continue to possess *throughout* life).

This isn't an argument against progressivism per se, but it is an argument as to why progressives should be more understanding and sympathetic to some people who struggle to adapt, and also why it's VITAL that opinion-formers in the media are consistent from the get-go, instead of recklessly believing that it's easy for everyone to change their opinions on a whim.