I’m somewhat puzzled by how all the influences you quote are fiction. I read and watched fiction as a child, and the only obvious consequence on my personality has been 1) extremely distorted—I can recognize the influence because I remember it, but you couldn’t look at that part of my personality and say “Aha, that came from Disney movies!” 2) tossed out of the window in a recent crisis of faith 3) more influenced by real life than fiction. I’ve been recalculating a lot of things since as young as 4 (most of which ended up wrong because of lack of evidence and a few fundamental mistakes), with a wave of recalculation each time I uncovered a fundamental mistake (happened twice) and many recalculations ended up in a very different place from their starting point, which gives somewhat more credence to the “lovely excuse” when it applies.
What did I pick up from childhood? Altruism? I can’t trace back the causal line, I don’t remember a point at which I wasn’t altruistic in full generality—I do remember stories about “altruism = good” and “ingroup/outgroup dichotomy = bad”, but I already agreed with that. What I remember picking up were social norms of the form “Saying ‘X is Y’ is good”—but unlike other children, I picked up “X is Y”—“Truth is good”, “Death is bad” (didn’t quite believe that one, had to recalculate later), “Love is good” (tossed out of the window when I realized “love” is vague). But I picked up those from social life, not fiction—and I was a stereotypical bookworm. I may have confused “good fiction” and “good life” due to fiction, but real life influences look more like the culprits.
The simplest hypothesis is not “People are embarrassed”. I bet they simply don’t know. Most people are just terrible at introspection, and don’t even think about it.
Also, yes, I’m going to get you started. Incredible disregard for what?
I talked to other people about such calls. They called me evil. Apparently, people don’t see the proposition “Aid is good” as following from “Aid helps people” (a purely factual claim) and “Helping people is good” (which only evil people deny); it’s all in the same mental bucket. So we’re pretty much screwed explaining it. Moreover, even when people finally get the distinction, the claims tend to be rejected at the speed of thought—because we all know “Aid is good”.