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Notes -
This is where you get to postmodernism — the view that there is no objectivity, it's just warring memes and primate social games all the way down (the wordcel version of "there is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it"), you fight for your tribe and its memes because it's your tribe. For many people, they do not have "principles" or even beliefs, they have a side. (Wasn't that the whole "arguments as soldiers" thing?)
I'd push back a little here, thinking about both the Sacred Congregation of the Index, and modern online debates, about the memetic competitiveness of ideas on equal versus unequal knowledge bases — a priest is equipped to defeat the "viral memes" of a heretic in the way the lay person is not. Because a "heretic" often knows more about the field of their heresy than the average lay person. To consider items from this forum, the average HBD proponent probably knows a lot more about human genetics than your average "blank slate normie." Or, to go to the "Nazis at a table" analogy, our own resident Holocaust revisionists know a lot more details about the history of the camps than someone who's maybe just watched Schindler's List once.
In fact, I see people on the left make this argument; that between equally well-educated academic experts in a field, the left-wing ideas inevitably win the debate against their rivals — hence the left's near-total dominance of academia — but the ignorant lay people, not so well-armed, end up being led astray down the "far-right radicalization pipeline" by smart-but-evil figures like Jordan Peterson.
Except that they do sometimes try to "convert them away from Nazi-ness"… in the matter of an inquisitor (or a fire-and-brimstone Puritan preacher): "Repent your heresy, or suffer the consequences!" And for Puritans in particular, expulsion from the community, shunning from "polite society" is a major part of "consequences." Remember, excommunication is "a medicinal penalty of the Church," intended to bring the offender to reform their behavior, repent, and return to full communion.
(And maybe add in a bit of the disgust/contamination mechanisms behind the concept of "untouchability" that appears in so many cultures — that some people are just so indelibly tainted that anything and anyone they contact will be irreversibly polluted by it, as to why certain people must never be associated with, and anyone who has so associated must be treated as one of them as well. EDIT: see also @Southkraut's comment here.)
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