I understand how easy it is to persuade crowds to believe things. Just keep blaring the message you want them to hear until a few of them start chanting along, and once it becomes a normal idea to have it will keep spreading, and by tying it in with the things they do believe in: maybe racism, maybe the illusion of fairness, or maybe a thin veneer of communism; suddenly the message becomes a part of their own identity by being attached to those thoughts and feelings they already had.
What I don’t understand is not how or why, what I want to know is simply how did they become these sort of creatures in the first place when so many of us do not. Are we all equally susceptible or are there two breeds of human alive on this earth? Is it genetic or is it learned? I simply cannot bring myself to relate.
It starts with unhappiness and the belief that you are always right. Then it goes to “it’s okay to do bad things because I’m a good person.” Then things degrade from there under any leader that tells you what you want to hear.
I understand how easy it is to persuade crowds to believe things. Just keep blaring the message you want them to hear until a few of them start chanting along, and once it becomes a normal idea to have it will keep spreading, and by tying it in with the things they do believe in: maybe racism, maybe the illusion of fairness, or maybe a thin veneer of communism; suddenly the message becomes a part of their own identity by being attached to those thoughts and feelings they already had.
What I don’t understand is not how or why, what I want to know is simply how did they become these sort of creatures in the first place when so many of us do not. Are we all equally susceptible or are there two breeds of human alive on this earth? Is it genetic or is it learned? I simply cannot bring myself to relate.
It starts with unhappiness and the belief that you are always right. Then it goes to “it’s okay to do bad things because I’m a good person.” Then things degrade from there under any leader that tells you what you want to hear.
I wouldn’t describe myself as having grown up happy, nor do I imagine a lot of the privileged and wealthy who now push extreme beliefs were unhappy.