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People in repressive regimes easily get overloaded, fed up, frustrated, and of course make more than a fair share of mistakes, even when they are basically on the right track. Not everyone can be an Oskar Schindler -- that level of cool under fire is rare and valuable. And in those areas with the highest concentration of repression, selection pressures will be very significant; you would expect only to find those outliers, in terms of personality, who would be both motivated enough and perseverant enough to dive into those depths, and those traits are likely to correlate with plenty of other things that can be weaknesses. There are fine lines -- and relative ones -- between perspicacity and paranoia, between holistic judgment and black-and-white thinking, between personal virtues and social vices, etc.
I find in talking with progressives as well as MAGA types that there is usually a core or kernel of value, often surrounded and obscured by more dubious stuff, but I am well passed the idea that "extremism" or even major asocial/atypical behavior is a reliable indicator that someone should be ignored. Too many central, stable, status-quo social formations, ideologies, and institutions have been revealed to be grossly mistaken at best and patently corrupt at worst. My guess is there may well be a very interesting historical connection being drawn by the woman, for instance, even if it happens to be wrong (though who's to say if we haven't even encountered its content?).
This is the conclusion I've come to as well. The people who are most likely to break from any social hegemony and are most willing to criticise its most sacred tenets (which I believe can be a valuable and necessary thing to do) are almost certainly going to have many outlier personality traits which mean they likely won't behave in a manner which people would usually term as "pro-social", even in other parts of life unrelated to politics.
Most of the time, the people who will break from the majority or mainstream view are likely to lean towards being bitter, disagreeable provocateurs who don't care much for "the wisdom of the masses" or the niceties of social life. Additionally, the very effective ones are likely going to be driven and almost obsessive in nature, but they're also going to be motivated by very different considerations than your average person is.
I suspect that, often, you would find more than a small heaping of self-destruction in their behaviours too - it kind of comes with the territory when you're not only willing to firmly stick to your unorthodox beliefs but also risk social death in order to promote these beliefs (keeping in mind that a willingness to self-deceive e.g. genuinely believing in the orthodox view and promoting it is the most personally beneficial behaviour in terms of social gain). "I will die on the hill of my convictions"-type behaviours are principled but almost certainly do not correlate with positive personal outcomes.
I can very much testify that in my experience, those attributes that make one personable and affable and those that make one an independent thinker who is willing to openly criticise mainstream thought in any significant way do not seem to overlap.
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Perhaps there was truth in the Soviet diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia, its just that it was caused by the regime itself.
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