When I look back at myself as a teenager, I had a lot of cringy or immature thoughts about how the world worked. Cringiest of all is how certain I was about my own correctness.
Now, in middle age, I look at myself back then and realize how wrong about a lot of stuff I was. Except one thing; when I was young, I suspected that authority figures and people in power were mostly incompetent and/or corrupt. Not only have the intervening years shown me that I was right, I didn’t know the half of it.