This is such a naive take that I'm honesty not sure how to respond. Like I mean this with zero judgement in the world, are you 14? Because this is word for word what I would have said at that age. And dgmr, I was certain and steadfast that I was correct and everyone else were just idiots.
It's difficult to explain why this is wrong because the very premise that ideas are even in competition in the manner you're suggesting just isn't true. There isn't some arena where scribes record victories and losses. And even on the individual level it doesn't work, that someone when presented with the truth will change their opinion. People won't even change their opinion even when it stands to benefit them personally.
I think folks get this idea of "marketplace of ideas" in their head and assume that "fitness" for an idea correlates with correctness. That better ideas spread and survive. No — entertaining ideas, ideas that conform to our existing biases, ideas that we were conditioned to think, ideas that get repeated over and over by someone with a big enough megaphone, ideas that sound plausibly correct, ideas that make people feel clever for thinking them, ideas that fit a particular narrative you believe, propaganda that is spread far and wide.
Being right has never and will never be enough. No one, not you, not me, not anyone is immune to taking on bad ideas. It took 40 years of the entire god damn western world organizing itself around a single message to get a critical mass people to believe that homosexuals were regular people and it still hasn't fully worked. Women have the rights we do because of the feminist movement in the 1970s. Slavery was abolished in 1865 and folks still think black people are inferior.
You're taking on the fallacy that progress just happens and isn't the result of a fuckton of work and sacrifice by people who consciously made it happen and who are out in the fields weeding constantly.
"When your crops are so bad you need to use herbicides to kill weeds lest they immediately take over your farm, it's time to change your crops."
Surely there must be some reasonable explanation for why you are still right and correct even though your ideas constantly lose to others without censorship. It can't be that you're just wrong.
