this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Politics
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It’s so bleak because I can understand the survival instinct to cling to and adopt the opinions of the group that wants you dead in the hopes that they’ll spare you, or that you’ll be able to preserve your relationships. But people like this do almost more damage than the ones they’re doing the dirty work for. Especially the famous ones. Some of them have actively made a career our of lending credibility to bigotry. I can’t help but notice how none of them seem to have fully denounced the party or its positions, or gone back on any of their previous statements.
Have you heard of the Ash conformity experiments? About 75% of the test subjects gave incorrect answers knowingly, because the rest of the group disagreed. 3 people were enough to trigger such a response....
This fascinates me. Kind of terrifying how vulnerable humans are to the need for group acceptance.
Agreed, it says a lot about the current political climate.
I recently read a letter by Dietrich Bonnhoefer, who was a German Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi dissident, who was imprisoned in 1943, hanged by Hitler's personal directive in April 1945.
His letter is titled "On Stupidity" and it explains A LOT about the same phenomenon.
Conversely, being a lone beacon of truth and rationality has gotten people killed before, like Socrates. Or like how the few who opposed the Iraq war before we knew it was based on lies were branded as cowards and traitors.
There is value in conforming.