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by tachyonbeam 1842 days ago
I think most people just have a tendency to to repeat dogma they are exposed to, based on the groups they belong in. If you join any group anywhere, be it people who practice yoga, the burning man crowd, or an online forum about programming, you'll find that there's a hierarchy, with some individuals who are highly regarded by the group, you might call them thought leaders. The individuals at the top have certain beliefs, and most people in the group will echo those beliefs as dogma everyone should believe in, and try to suppress dissenting views.
2 comments

More than that, the thought leaders set the emotional tone of interaction with outsiders.

The problem is that the US is an aggressively authoritarian country, and the default tone is violent narcissistic bullying.

Unlike other authoritarian countries this isn't explicitly state sanctioned.

It's more of a continually dramatised and modelled mode of relationship which is so ingrained in so many public interactions - from school to work to "self help" to corporate culture to mainstream media to social media to large parts of elected government - that it sinks into the background as a kind of unavoidable noise.

It would be deafening if you'd never experienced it before. Because it's so common it's tuned out consciously, but still dominant unconsciously.

The "woke" part isn't the problem. It's the copying of the dominant emotional ideology that leads to both left and right extremism, and also justifies excess corporate power and other horrors.

It's all part of the same issue, but both left and right are only looking at small parts of it - and getting angry about those while missing the underlying issue.

> I think most people just have a tendency to to repeat dogma they are exposed to, based on the groups they belong in.

This realization is basically how the "NPC" meme was born. It predated the "no inner voice" study, that's just how most people seem to have come across the idea because the study half-jokingly caused a "wait a minute, we were right?" moment.