[noduerme]

This is a very good description of the paranoid, mob-mentality anti-intellectual subculture I've seen wax and wane in America throughout my lifetime. And I grew up in the 80s surrounded by people who were rejects from this anti-intellectual culture, who were smart enough to think all kinds of unauthorized thoughts for themselves. I believed that, above all things, this rejectionist safety-seeking and fearful mob mentality was old and that it was inevitable that its smarter progeny would rebel against it.

It's really only when you look at it through the frame of the Weimar Republic, or, the 60s youth in Argentina or Chile or the 50s in Hungary or right now in Russia or China, that you see how fragile individualism is, because it is so damn easy to whip up a mob against anyone who thinks differently, as you're describing. What is so telling about this book is how the mob itself barely even thinks it's a mob. Most of the time it doesn't even think it's doing any harm or anything unpopular. That is the lesson that we need to learn as a species - not some vague idea of freedom, but that hard individualism is more valuable than easy camaraderie. There were about 50 years worth of Hollywood movies trying to reinforce this notion, but about 10 years of social media obliterated it.