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.
A lot of people really believe in hierarchies, and their belief in hierarchies as either natural, beneficial, or inevitable makes them oppose socialism or even egalitarianism more generally.
Obviously many people believe capitalism is a “necessary evil” with the empirically incorrect but very common belief that competition is required to achieve economic growth and this makes them believe in capitalist hierarchy.
But there are others who don’t think of it as a necessary evil but go a step further to the extremity of equating material success with virtue, which is a key idea that underpins neoliberalism. This group are today dominant among the ruling class and they justify their wealth with ideological belief that success is due to personal ability, and therefore if someone is materially successful that means that are an innately superior person. This group will actively seek a capitalist hierarchy and call it a virtuous moral outcome to have such uneven distribution of wealth.
It’s like under the absolute monarchies of times past, these would always be justified as morally correct even divinely ordained and we get some kind of secular equivalent of this with the implicit belief in some kind of Social Darwinism that you find at the core of neoliberalism. These people view equality as an abomination.
Many people either have true wealth and a true position of social power, and often also working class people who lack class consciousness and are alienated into identifying with some kind of identity associated with that position of power even if they themselves don’t have that power (eg the working class white males who are the foot soldiers of white supremacism) and these people, even though they actually don’t occupy a high position of economic power, this group often still highly value the aspects of their identity associated with that power. They feel offended if you say everyone should be equal because they don’t agree that everyone is equal. They gain some kind of sense of self-worth simply by identifying with the ruling class.
The fact is many people are either supremacists and therefore oppose equality since that offends their sense of supremacy.