The social costs of left-to-right political change
Commenter David Foster writes:
Many people don’t like changing their opinions, and many people don’t want to lose jobs, business opportunities, and friendships by holding & expressing unapproved opinions. Such behavior becomes much easier to self-justify when the vast majority of ‘information’ flowing across one’s view supports the safe opinions.
I would add “and when almost everyone in one’s social acquaintance shares those opinions.”
I’ve spent about seventeen years chronicling, among other things, the social costs of such political change. It was nearly twenty years ago (!) that I made my own political transition – which, by the way, was from relatively moderate Democrat to somewhat-libertarian conservative – and the political climate was different then. It was already hostile and bitter, but not even close to as extreme as it is now.
Would I have done the same in the current climate? Yes. But I understand that one reason it’s so difficult to do, and one reason a person might adopt a stance of not wanting to hear information contrary to the beliefs that person already holds, is that it is now extremely threatening to make that particular change.
As David Foster writes, it now potentially involves jobs, business opportunities, and friendships. Sometimes it also involves marital tension and even dissolution, heartbreaking conflict with relatives including one’s own children, and even the threat of imprisonment depending on how activist one becomes. Social media shunning and viral calls for cancellation are also possible. The Gulag doesn’t loom – yet – and perhaps an actual Gulag as in the past will never arrive here. But if it doesn’t, it will be because it won’t be necessary. There are other ways to make people miserable, ways that don’t seem so overtly evil and yet nevertheless do the trick.
When I underwent my own political change most of this had not yet escalated to that point. And yet even back then I risked – and experienced – social disapproval and hostility from some friends and relatives. I had previously been so naive as to be unaware of even the possibility that that would be happening, and so it came as a real shock. For most people today, such a reaction on the part of their friends and family would almost certainly not come as a shock, because it would be difficult to be that naive in the current climate.
As I said, it wouldn’t have stopped me, but I think I completely understand why others would be reluctant to tread that path. Who wants to become a pariah? It’s easier to not expose yourself to views that could challenge your belief system, particularly when you’ve been told for most of your life (and almost everyone around you believes) that those sources are unreliable and even mendacious. To understand that it is more the opposite, and that the sources you have trusted your entire life are much more pervaded by lies and that you have previously swallowed them, is very very difficult to acknowledge. So most people don’t want to risk even the distant possibility and reject it out of hand.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/10/02/the-social-costs-of-left-to-right-political-change/
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