I don’t know about other people, but pretty much the only reason that I didn’t become a socialist earlier than I did is because I just didn’t know what socialism really is. Someone has to be straight up evil in order to understand socialism and still oppose it.
I know this is probably pretty obvious for most people but I only became conscious of it recently.
One of the biggest problems with discussing politics is just setting definitions tbh. I’ve found that most people that talk about “socialism” straight up don’t even have a consistent definition themselves. One day they’ll use the word to mean “an economic system without commerce” then another day they’ll use it to simply mean “sharing” and another day they’ll use it as a synonym for “evil”.
Approaching people like this is maddening because you can’t say what you mean directly without being wildly misunderstood. But I agree that most people that oppose “socialism” don’t know what socialism really is.