> [Professor Kuran's] theory relates to things like the fall of the Soviet Union, where almost no one saw the end coming, because they hadn’t realised that an entire population was falsifying their experience to each other. He sees a clear parallel.
The article didn't seem to indicate how the end of this movement would come, unless I missed something. Based on this analogy, how would this come about?
If we draw from the Society analogy, people realized that their neighbors weren't happy with the government all along and production quotas weren't actually being met.
So presumably, the author thinks people will look around and realize that. . . they were all more racist and sexist then they were letting on? Yeah the analogy doesn't actually hold when stretched that far. One of the key steps in purity politics is to engage in self-flagellation about your own inadequacies as a member of a privileged group (if you are) or to ham up the victimization and harm inflicted on you (if you aren't). I suppose there would be some "realization" that the "harm" being claimed is being blown out of proportion, but again I think this is something most people understand already.
Other way around. They will realize they (and most people) aren't actually racist and sexist, so why are they bothering with the whole social signalling they are doing?
Same place as the lines for "lets you check wikipedia" in the source code of the browser you're using.
In other words: nowhere in particular, yet when you take the end product as a whole, it's there still the same. The realities of group selection will not be mocked.
So, maybe not "literally in our genes" like GP wrote in the sense of specific location, but ineradicable nonetheless.
This concept of "ineradicable yet impossible to pin down" is a pattern you'll see anywhere development happens from abstract top-down pressures. Amazon's problems with AI-assisted hiring are relevant here, as is the connection between corporate malfeasance and quarterly targets.
More that they were being a bunch of godamned idiots who were neither helping outreach against bigotry, harming actual bigots, nor helping those harmed by it really. The collective lie/delusion is that they are involved in anything remotely good in spite of intentions.
I would put it in the Soviet analogy as "Even if the boss and shareholders get richer from your work under capitalism doesn't mean that the Soviet system did anything to help the workers. They are doing perfectly fine and you are only hurting yourselves."
Not a perfect metaphor of course but really the nominal target is fundamentally irrelevant to the impact of their actions.
I love and hate the evolution of the use of the word 'bigot'.
Such folks engaged in purity policing throw it around like it's just another word for 'bad person', but almost every use of it I see is highly ironic.
The dictionary definition is 'a person who is intolerant towards those holding different opinions.' Almost everyone I've ever seen calling someone else a bigot online was using it to shame or beat down those who are not displaying bigotry, but merely different opinions.
They may have been objectionable opinions. They may even have been racist or sexist opinions. But never have I seen 'bigotry' applied correctly, and usually it seems to be applied by people unaware that they are the bigot in the situation.
I suppose in time the original meaning is lost, and we are left with just another insult. Which is a shame. But in the mean time I get to enjoy the irony.
I've only recently gotten any good at seeing the metagame strategies evolve. I used to get worked up when new words came into favor overnight to be abused in various ways.
They lie to us we are getting paid, we lie to them that we are working.
The USSR and Eastern block knew what the problems with the system were and the collapse of the system was the outcome exactly no one wanted. With predicable results.
Adam Curtis' "Hypernomalisation" talks about this exact topic - the system collapses because everyone, from top to bottom, is engaged in a lie, either knowingly or unknowingly. All it takes is someone who is willing to take a stand and say "wait, none of this makes any sense". That's basically how communism in the Eastern Europe collapsed, and that's how these communities can - once enough people realize that this entire self-policing of morality doesn't make any sense because in fact everyone is excluded by the insane rules the community collapses.
Having been there for the collapse, no that is not how the regime collapsed. It was 20 somethings pushing for concessions on the prices of bread and powdered milk and the powers that be caving into demands and then deciding that they would be better off without communism and going further than any of the protestors expected.
This movie was made in 1967: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_(film) and was seen by 20% of the population of the country at the time. This is not the product of a society where no one had any idea what was wrong and how it could be fixed.
The article didn't seem to indicate how the end of this movement would come, unless I missed something. Based on this analogy, how would this come about?