I'm afraid that one day I'll wake up and I'll figure out that this whole time my opinion was wrong.

There are ways around this, you know. It turns out that it ins't hard to figure out where these ideas will come from, even if you or I can't determine the particular ideas themselves.

The answer is really clear when you think about it. They might not always come originally from this, but they're usually found in: the most radical left-wing politics. That's it. That's all there is to it.

That's where you have to look if you want to know. You don't even have to understand the ideas or their motivations yourself yet.

But if you were actually interested in learning about "the next big thing"/extensions of compassion, you implicitly already know where to look. And that's because there are other people out there- there are always going to be other people out there- who are smarter than you or I, who do "get it", who do have the intuition/vision/intellect/empathy/whatever to understand the next development. Everyone knows that this is where the "next thing we come to accept that we once didn't accept" comes from. We just don't always want to do it, we just don't always want to look there, because it takes effort. Some people find it difficult and uncomfortable.

The problem isn't that these ideas don't exist yet: the problem is that a large portion of the population doesn't have the perspective to wrap their head around the motivation for these ideas yet, to understand why they make sense, because the arguments debunking the "reality" (the social norms and status quos) we currently accept haven't been sufficiently simplified for mass consumption or repeated often enough for a critical mass of favorable popular opinion to be reached.

Every single we accept today as "normal", was at one time unthinkably radical for it's time. Social protections sexism, racism, LGBT rights, universal human rights, etc., were one time seen as "crazy", "weak, unimportant concerns of those bleeding-heart radicals", or as "going too far" (without realizing that the social gains made from increasing these protections always far out outweighed any losses).

Economic protections like abolition of slavery, or child labor or the 40 hour work week, or welfare, were seen as "unaffordable" or "unfeasible", or "they'd ruin our competitiveness" (without realizing that the social gains made from increasing these protections always far out outweighed any losses).

I'm afraid that one day I'll wake up and I'll figure out that this whole time my opinion was wrong.

The second thing you can do to prevent this is recognize reactionary patterns of thought in others and reactionary patterns of argument that have been used in the past in previously-rejected ideas (like slavery, sexism, etc.), and see if they apply to any of the ways you think about something today, yourself.

• Reactionaries reverse cause and effect as a method to blame individuals for their environment or the outcomes of something (victim blaming), rather than identifying the environmental or social causes. They say things like "Your choices led to your poverty", not "Growing up in poverty lead to the choices you had available" or "Gay people are promiscuous because they're deviants and should be rejected from society", not "Being seen as deviants and being rejected from society has lead to some gay people engaging in risky behaviors." Using this, reactionaries dismiss the concerns of radical voices and even subtly dismiss the marginalized themselves, in consistently the same ways.

• Right-wing conservatives also pay attention to (or only understand) the most marginal, smallest short-term context, not the largest, most long-term context. Maximizing personal profit at the expense of others or of social function is immensely profitable for yourself in the short term- which is why so many people do it-, but if it leads to such an unstable system that it collapses, it was all wasted effort. Think: who is more likely to pursue ever-increasing quarterly business profits, even if the business fails in 5 years because of it? Are the kind of people interested in immediate, personal profit, vs. sustainable social profit right-wing or left-wing in their politics?

• Politics of the right-wing is more interested in promoting authoritarianism and control of other people, and politics of the left wing is more interested in equal treatment of all. Self-explanatory.

• Familiarize yourself with logical fallacies more commonly employed by right-wing thinking, things like "appeal to tradition", "appeal to nature", "false dilemma", etc.

Let's put some of these together to see how they all work in conjunction.

"Women don't need equal education, because women don't have as much ambition as men (reverse of cause and effect. . They aren't as "

Women shouldn't be afforded all the same rights as men (authoritarianism). They just aren't 'naturally' (appeal to nature) as ambitious as men (reversing cause and effect). They need protection and they should be the property of us men (short term personal profit for a couple individuals despite long term decay to society).

Black people shouldn't be afforded all the same rights as slave owners (authoritarianism). They just aren't 'naturally' (appeal to nature) as intelligent as the white man (reversing cause and effect. It was lack of education that made slaves appear less capable of intelligence. It wasn't "If we spend resources on teaching them to read, they won't learn. It was "They appear ignorant and incapable of learning, because we've made it illegal to spend resources on teaching them to read"). They need protection and they should be the property of us slave owners (short term personal profit for a couple individuals despite long term decay to society).

Animals shouldn't be afforded any of the same rights as human (authoritarianism). They just aren't 'naturally' (appeal to nature) as capable of experiencing pain or reality as humans are (reversing cause and effect), so sacrificing them for food or convenience is justified. They need protection and they should be the property of us homo sapiens (short term personal profit for a couple individuals despite long term decay to society).

Eventually, these incorrect ways of thinking about the world (motivated by wanting to increase our own personal profit or position, no matter who it damages) get deconstructed, get named (sexism, racism, speciesism), get exposed.

You can use these techniques and apply them to your current beliefs to understand how you, yourself are already "on the wrong side of history" (we all are, about something, because there's always a more radical idea out there). To uncover the ways in which you've been dismissing radical ideas without really understanding them.

And if you've never been on the other side of that, it's incredibly frustrating. You get people who are so conservative and small-minded, who don't even know that you're trying to help them progress, doing things like misinterpreting your ideas, and then laughing confidently at that misrepresentation of them. How many social reactionaries truly understand women's rights? How many scientific reactionaries truly understand evolution? How many economic reactionaries truly understand the critiques communism has for capitalism? Oftentimes, they think they do, but they don't. It's an eye-opening experience to be laughed at, but it means you're on the right track.

I'm afraid that one day I'll wake up and I'll figure out that this whole time my opinion was wrong.

So you already know where to look for these ideas, if you're interested, you just haven't accepted many of them yet.

There's one final thing you can do to prevent this from happening.

When someone who is more radical than you (or younger than you, because oftentimes younger generations are more radical than the one that preceded them) proposes an idea that seems too radical for you, and your first impulse is to follow that same pattern of conservative intellectual rejection ("oh, that's too extreme/too unfeasible/something for pussies"), choose to reject that impulse. Don't say, "That's too extreme" or "That's unfeasible" or "That's not important", at least, until you've studied the idea presented in some depth (and from a source of information that is actually radical, not a reactionary point of propaganda dressed up as a source of information). If you don't know what to say when someone proposes something "too out there" for you to immediately accept, you can say things like: "Oh, I haven't heard of that before. Perhaps I'll learn more about it" or "Oh, that seems like an unusual idea. I have some questions about it..."

If you don't automatically reject radical ideas when they are brought up in conversation, radicals will be more open to explaining them and bringing them up in the first place, and the new ideas you don't want to disregard and find yourself out of touch with later in life will reach you faster.