Having come from an extremely varied background myself and then spending 12 years in the academic environment I can fully support your conclusion. I got used to the owl-like stare when offering irrefutable facts on an issue, but no change in the listener's position. I didn't care what they thought of me, so in turn, they felt threatened. I really never have needed to "belong" to a group, so "macht nichts". It is an amazing phenomenon though, isn't it? 'Makes one wonder how the human race survived this long if "belonging" holds supremacy over facts.
There is no gene for conformity, but human society has selected for that for at least 100,000 years, no doubt a good bit longer. In the smaller scale social groups that must have had strong survival effects. But in maybe just the last 500 years we've scaled up to social sizes unimaginable to our distant forebears and yet we're effectively built with the need to conform and it really no longer confers any survival benefit. Or in the case of Ms. Good, the conflict between two conformity demands was counter to survival.
Belonging once meant belonging to one's tribe of origin - belonging to a family (both nuclear and extended), community, and church. Now we have the breakdown of the nuclear family, and families scattered by geography (so no extended family nearby). We have people raised without any lasting sense of community.
I describe that as "culture". What we think of as The American Way of Life encompasses all you describe, and more. There are many nuances to culture. My Irish and German ancestors who came here several generations ago understood they would be leaving behind many of the differences between the culture they wee leaving and the one they were coming to. Many of our younger generation, for all the reasons you mention Jeanne, and the people coming from other countries, don't seem to understand those nuances, nor do they want to. They see it as their duty to change the culture here. Did we fail our own children in understanding things like the importance of family? for instance. I give a lot of the "credit" not only to academics who are on a mission of their own, but to social media.
Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa’s book “The Intelligence Paradox: Why the Intelligent Choice Isn't Always the Smart One,” tells it all. Common sense and domestic happiness (i.e. being fruitful and multiplying) more likely to be found in people of average intelligence than our Piled-Higher-and-Deeper (PhD) academic clowns.
"Hannah Arendt observed that ideological thinking offers “the false security of consistency” in a world marked by contingency and plurality. Polarization thrives where uncertainty is unbearable. In such contexts, argument becomes less about truth than about preserving one's identity. To concede a point feels like self-annihilation," (p.15) from my latest project. The issue, I believe, is tied to the postmodern worldview in which relativism reigns, and narcissism, caused by rejecting moral values, along with the use of subjective emotionalism as the arbiter of truth, are the major factors. The greater one's learning - without conscious moral anchors - the greater the chance of one being led down all the sordid paths we know and recognize as failures.
Or maybe this is the same phenomenon that leads people to accept what the crowd says, as shown by multiple psychological experiments, where people change their minds when the shills all agree on a wrong answer.
I also have been trying to understand how this “pandemic of reason-resistant dissonance” continues to spread so virulently and tenaciously. Indoctrination? Dominance of complicit legacy media? Mass psychosis? (Heck, maybe even some sort of possession?) Your ideas make sense. They are the masters of rational-lies—a technique they depend on to survive. They are intellectual and moral contortionists because, as Gutfeld says, they can’t bear facing the reality that they are NOT the good guys.
Having come from an extremely varied background myself and then spending 12 years in the academic environment I can fully support your conclusion. I got used to the owl-like stare when offering irrefutable facts on an issue, but no change in the listener's position. I didn't care what they thought of me, so in turn, they felt threatened. I really never have needed to "belong" to a group, so "macht nichts". It is an amazing phenomenon though, isn't it? 'Makes one wonder how the human race survived this long if "belonging" holds supremacy over facts.
There is no gene for conformity, but human society has selected for that for at least 100,000 years, no doubt a good bit longer. In the smaller scale social groups that must have had strong survival effects. But in maybe just the last 500 years we've scaled up to social sizes unimaginable to our distant forebears and yet we're effectively built with the need to conform and it really no longer confers any survival benefit. Or in the case of Ms. Good, the conflict between two conformity demands was counter to survival.
Belonging once meant belonging to one's tribe of origin - belonging to a family (both nuclear and extended), community, and church. Now we have the breakdown of the nuclear family, and families scattered by geography (so no extended family nearby). We have people raised without any lasting sense of community.
I describe that as "culture". What we think of as The American Way of Life encompasses all you describe, and more. There are many nuances to culture. My Irish and German ancestors who came here several generations ago understood they would be leaving behind many of the differences between the culture they wee leaving and the one they were coming to. Many of our younger generation, for all the reasons you mention Jeanne, and the people coming from other countries, don't seem to understand those nuances, nor do they want to. They see it as their duty to change the culture here. Did we fail our own children in understanding things like the importance of family? for instance. I give a lot of the "credit" not only to academics who are on a mission of their own, but to social media.
Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa’s book “The Intelligence Paradox: Why the Intelligent Choice Isn't Always the Smart One,” tells it all. Common sense and domestic happiness (i.e. being fruitful and multiplying) more likely to be found in people of average intelligence than our Piled-Higher-and-Deeper (PhD) academic clowns.
"Hannah Arendt observed that ideological thinking offers “the false security of consistency” in a world marked by contingency and plurality. Polarization thrives where uncertainty is unbearable. In such contexts, argument becomes less about truth than about preserving one's identity. To concede a point feels like self-annihilation," (p.15) from my latest project. The issue, I believe, is tied to the postmodern worldview in which relativism reigns, and narcissism, caused by rejecting moral values, along with the use of subjective emotionalism as the arbiter of truth, are the major factors. The greater one's learning - without conscious moral anchors - the greater the chance of one being led down all the sordid paths we know and recognize as failures.
This matches my experience.
A bit of an inside look at this, at least from my perspective...
https://rathercurmudgeonly.substack.com/p/proud-class-traitor-part-1
So this is about luxury beliefs?
Or maybe this is the same phenomenon that leads people to accept what the crowd says, as shown by multiple psychological experiments, where people change their minds when the shills all agree on a wrong answer.
I also have been trying to understand how this “pandemic of reason-resistant dissonance” continues to spread so virulently and tenaciously. Indoctrination? Dominance of complicit legacy media? Mass psychosis? (Heck, maybe even some sort of possession?) Your ideas make sense. They are the masters of rational-lies—a technique they depend on to survive. They are intellectual and moral contortionists because, as Gutfeld says, they can’t bear facing the reality that they are NOT the good guys.