Amerika

Modernity consists of any society in its later stages, when peer pressure has taken over from hierarchy and produced a temporary wealth wave that increases technological abundance. The primary goal of any civilization then is to resist peer pressure, but humans are social creatures, and this is our backdoor.

To reprogram yourself from the modern mindset, it is essential to first recognize how much your mind is controlled by propaganda, especially of the social kind as your friends, family, and coworkers endlessly repeat what they saw on television, read in a newspaper, heard on YouTube, or picked up from others.

It turns out that humans change political opinions under peer pressure:

We find an error rate of 33% for the standard length-of-line experiment which replicates the original findings by Asch (1951, 1955, 1956). Furthermore, in the incentivized condition the error rate decreases to 25%. For political opinions we find a conformity rate of 38%. However, besides openness, none of the investigated personality traits are convincingly related to the susceptibility of group pressure.

This means that if you are surrounded by others, and they hold an opinion, over a third of the time, you will adopt it as well; this applies to single instances, so if you can imagine that repeated over time, you can see how this quickly adds up to nearly uniform political opinion. People in groups synchronize their ideals.

“Openness” refers to a personality trait that some have — a certain willingness to consider any idea or option — and these people have it even worse. To them, an idea must be digested by trying it out before it can be considered yea or nay, which means that they adopt the idea and get into the cycle early.

Further, many openness cases are simply low self-esteem people who lack direction, therefore view as new thing as possibly their thing. Instead of being ends-over-means, they have no direction and wait for some means to appeal to them, completing their means-over-ends thinking.

Consider how many things have been normalized in this society by popularity that are unnecessary and therefore parasitic:

I refuse to eat out. I think that eating out on any level is one of the biggest wastes of money out there.

Going to restaurants may be enjoyable, but if it is not worth the money, then this is a drain of money from other more essential activities and is not proportionately valuable. Yet such things are normal because people have no other direction and are easily swayed by the group.

The first step in deprogramming from modernity is to become skeptical about what “everyone does” or “everyone believes,” because most commonly, you are going to find a begging-the-question fallacy: you should believe it or do it because everyone does, so not only is there safety in numbers but you can stop worrying about whether it is good.

Herd uses the same approach with politics. They try to project certain things as believed by the herd as a whole when really only a small number are concerned with them. Usually only a few million people out of a population of over three hundred million are concerned, but this is enough to fool people into changing their opinion.

Of course, nature trumps nurture. Most people have no opinions and go with the flow because they are apathetic, insincere, and clueless. However, among those who can have ideas, too many are comfortable being gaslit by their peer group and feel empowered for having allowed this.

However, as we come to the end of an era when mass opinion ruled and mass manipulation was the norm, recognizing how much we were betrayed by something simple — listening to friends and emulating them — lets us know how deep the rot went, and how easy it is to stop the defective behavior.

Tags: gaslighting, indoctrination, modernity, peer pressure