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Ryan Gardner's avatar

"Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty"

- Hannah Arendt

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Lex Weiser's avatar

There's another interesting psychological factor in play here: when you coerce or persuade people to go along with something that they know is wrong, it creates cognitive dissonance. In order to reduce the stress from that dissonance, they will actually try to convince themselves that the thing is NOT wrong.

In other words, people can't change what they've already done, but they can subconsciously change how they feel about it. And research shows that they do.

Oh, you supported burning those women at the stake? Maybe they really were witches. Oh, you voted for Hitler in 1939? Well, he had a great economic plan. Oh, you had your family injected with toxic pseudo-vaccine? It can't really be dangerous. Oh, you voted for candidates that seem to be hell-bent on destroying our entire civilization? They really aren't, it's just a bunch of misinformation that makes it seem that way.

This is part of the reason why the majority always enable atrocity. Once they take a step in the wrong direction, they don't want to admit they were wrong.

https://dystopianliving.substack.com/p/the-psychology-of-compliance

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