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For example, a recent study of twins concluded that shifts in political ideology are more often the result of environmental factors such as peer influences than anything else.Owen Gregorian nicely summed up that study.
Hence,if people fear losing their most important relationships over a difference of opinion, they tend to shift their ideologyrather than face the isolation that comes with standing on principle.This formula is especially effective with young unmarried women.
If we don’t try harder to understand and resist this process, it can lead to bad stuff.
Blind Obedience to Social Influence Can Lead to Death
The suicide bomber is perhaps the most glaring example of the lengths to which some people will go to gain social favor and avoid social isolation. The bomber has been constantly conditioned to view “Islamic jihad” as the best path to respect from peers or family. It’s rooted in a propaganda campaign of hate that censors any other views.
Consider journalist Pierre Rehov’s interviews withfailed jihadists who explain their reasons for wanting to blow themselves up to kill Jews. “I wanted to become a martyr.” Another said he’d be “certain to be beloved. . . . If I had died, my mother would have considered it a blessing.” One mother in the video announced, “To be the parents of a martyr, that is the biggest reward. It’s a big honor for the family.”
Obviously, this is a perversionof a natural human desire to be a hero. When you believe even your own mother would hope for your death, what else is left? And when no other alternatives are permitted, then what should we expect?
Americans are proving to be just as prone to the cultivation of hatred. Consider all of the hostilities our elites successfully bred among us during the Covid era. When President Biden referred to Covid as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” all the forces of government, media, and the corporate worldcharacterized uninjected people as disease vectors responsible for murdering others. Many lost their livelihoods. Many were estranged from their families and friends.
As governor of Minnesota, vice presidential candidate Tim Walz even set up a snitch line so Minnesotans could report neighbors who were not compliant with his orders against gathering with friends at home.In such dystopias, you aren’t supposed to have any relationships the elites don’t authorize. Social trust erodes. Where does that leave us?
The Whole World Is Becoming An Insufferable Middle School
Let me offer a personal memoryto illustrate how far we’ve gone in this process. As a 13-year-old, I was about to depart the prison then known as junior high school for parole in summer vacation. After boarding my school bus to depart, I watched through the window as several queen-bee girls cried and hugged each other, mascara-streaked and affecting great sadness that the school year was over.
I observed that scene with curiosity and aversion. They were such a nasty and cruel gaggle who enjoyed getting nice people shunned by calling them “weird” and worse. Good riddance.
What a relief to escape that hellhole of constant insults and humiliations those girls seemed so sad to leave behind.Such cruelties even drove one of our classmates to a grisly suicide. His death was shocking news swept under the rug by teachers and students alike.
Back thenI was grateful to know there was a real world beyond the sewers of groupthink in junior high: a merit-based world where civility is expected, and people are taught to resist groupthink.That civilized world seems to be vanishing.
Today a mob of mean girl elites — like Harris, Walz, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and many more — are replacing it with a global junior high from which there is no escape.They seem to practice the politics of the “joy” that sadists feel when they inflict pain on people while teaching them to hate others.
https://thefederalist.com/2024/08/29/joy-rhetoric-is-an-orwellian-attempt-to-hide-democrats-hatred/