I think almost all of us have to learn that one through cold experience, except some folks who are lucky enough to have parents who teach them that. (I’d think more current kids are getting that lesson from their parents than during the time when we were growing up, just because a lot of activists are raising kids now. But during our youth? LOL, as if.) So no, I don’t think you should have known. We got told the world worked in a certain way - “if you educate people, they’ll understand and care” - and when we got educated ourselves, we cared, which proved the principle to us. So why would we assume others would act in an opposite, antisocial way?

I think it’s beautiful that we wanted to believe the best of people. We had to change our tactics when cold experience taught us our idealism was misplaced on many people, but it’s wonderful of us that we believed in people enough to believe that the only thing standing between every person and goodness was a lack of education. And it’s even more beautiful that we continue trying, even though we know most of the time it’ll be unsuccessful, because some of us want to help each other so much. And we learn and grow along the way (like learning to drop the albatross of respectability politics).