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Notes -
"Fear" is a strong word. There are absolutely people who disagree with the progressive/woke
consensusorthodoxy, but hold their tongues out of genuine fear of personal or professional repercussions. I think in most cases it's not so much fear as garden-variety conformity: wanting to fit in, not to be seen as weird. Most people aren't thinking "I'd better mouth the words 'defund the police', because if I don't, I'll lose my job": they're thinking "all my friends are saying 'defund the police', so I'll say it too, to fit in".Remember the Bataclan shooting, when people overlaid the French flag on top of their profile pictures on Facebook? I'm quite confident that a significant minority (if not an actual majority) of people doing so have no idea what it was intended to symbolise, and if I asked them "that shooting in the Bataclan was so horrific, wasn't it?" they wouldn't have a clue what I was talking about. It's not that these people think the shooting in the Bataclan was good, but pretended to think it was bad for fear of personal or professional repercussions - this isn't a Havel's greengrocer situation. It's that these people saw other people in their social circle overlaying the French flag on their profile pictures, and did likewise to fit in, at no point stopping to consider why their friends were overlaying the French flag on their profile pictures. Conformity for conformity's sake.
"So you're saying that most people calling for the police to be defunded or abolished are only doing so because they saw their friends doing so, no different from adopting a trendy hairstyle, and have put essentially zero thought into the practical implications of such a policy?" yeschad.jpg
But keep in mind. Being a nonconformist on the wrong things, even if they aren’t obvious can be harmful for your lifestyle. You might think that letting parents have a say in the types of books in the elementary school library is no big deal. But it later becomes a culture war thing and now that opinion is problematic. So there’s a pressure to conform beyond what would exist on most other issues (for example ask about what should be taught in a math class and whether parents should get a say, or whether violent books can be kept out of elementary schools) simply because it’s hard to know if some issue will become a shibboleth. That coupled with the permanent record created by social media makes “going along with the herd” a solid defense strategy. That’s a bit different from hairstyles which you can easily discard and nobody will care.
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