Basically we have a whole bunch of ways of saying "You can't possibly believe that!!". Which helps us avoid the terrifying fact that yes, people generally do believe it.
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Of course, "believe" doesn't mean what it means in econ class. It means that people get a warm feeling from asserting something, even if they don't know what it means. "God is omnipotent", etc.
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A lot of times we believe extreme things, simply because asserting those things all together in a group gives us a warm feeling of having an army on our side. It's not competitive wokeness. It's COOPERATIVE wokeness.
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"Virtue signaling" isn't fake or pretend. It's real. "Virtue", when it comes right down to it, means membership on a team. Sometimes, to prove you're on a team, it helps to say something people on the other team could never bring themselves to say.
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That doesn't mean people don't believe the things they say when they signal team membership. They DO believe them. It's just that the "belief" is the rush of good feeling from knowing that you have a team.
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An extremist is just a normal person in extreme circumstances. And group conflict, be it an army or a gang or a political movement or a Twitter mob, is an extreme situation.
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All this is to say, if your mental model of the opposing team is that they're a bunch of fakers trying to show off in front of each other...well, odds are you're wrong. It's probably something much more honest, much more powerful, and potentially much scarier, than that. (end)
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i dunno, after meeting some tumblr people, competitive wokeness/competitive victimhood does seem to be a thing with that crowd. though, super niche and the likely exception rather than the norm.
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I'm not sure whether I've met those people or not...but I very rarely meet someone who seems fake...
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the people i met skewed really young and spent most of their time online. i think some of it is that identity-building and identity-seeking that young people naturally need, but in a very public way that seems kind of punishing.
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And it didn't seem more like the team-joining/team-building exercise I described?
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some of it was definitely that, but there was also occasionally what felt to me like power-jockeying as to whose take was the 'most valid' or something. like people implying other peoples takes were wrong because they weren't marginalized "enough".
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Interesting. Yeah, power-jockeying within groups is a real thing too...
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yeah, and most of the time that takes place in ways that we know how to easily categorize, right? like, two dudes yelling at each other louder, or the PTA parents who compete on who brings better treats, or the whole 'keeping up with the joneses' thing
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i guess with the internet being a ~great equalizing force~, the things people power-struggle on are different and probably not as easily identifiable. need to see more examples for better pattern recognition
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Do you doubt that the social and professional pressures
@reihan describes are significant? They certainly have an impact on what I say and write (and choose not to talk or write about). -
I think that there are probably a few people out there claiming to be much more liberal than they really are, but that usually they're media people doing this strategically and cynically. Most people respond to social pressure by just shutting up, I think.
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I think that most online wokeness is expression of real grievances that people had been holding in for a long time, and that it's social media, not peer pressure, that causes those expressions to be over-dramatic and exaggerated. cc
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I guess I’m confused why you would draw a line between “social media” and “peer pressure”, as if the latter wasn’t a dominant factor in the former... isn’t peer pressure *amplified* by social media? You might not care what you say to 5 people, but 5000...
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5 people are your peers, 5000 people are not
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I think you're confusing "friends" with "peers", as well as underestimating how much human beings care about what other people think of them, especially when those people are seen as part of the same peer group (which, again, is not the same as one's circle of friends)
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"one belonging to the same societal group especially based on age, grade, or status" 5000 people can definitely be your peers... even 50,000 or 5 millionhttps://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/peer
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I understand your confusion though... prior to the advent of social media, most people weren't interacting with that many of their peers. But this is exactly the dynamic that social media has changed, enabling communication with much larger numbers of people from our peer group.
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