Speaker 1: Al Zone, Media, isis ALM, Shinrikyu, and Christian sign this on.
Speaker 2: At first glance, these movements appear to have almost nothing
Speaker 2: in common. One is transnational but territorially weakened terror network
Speaker 2: most active into twenty and twenty tens. One was a
Speaker 2: fringe Japanese doomsday culled from the nineties, and one remains
Speaker 2: a powerful political movement embedded in the heart of the US,
Speaker 2: the world's premier imperialist power. The ideologies may be irreconcilable,
Speaker 2: their enemies may be different, and their methods even may
Speaker 2: vary from gorilla warfare to political lobbying, and yet they
Speaker 2: have more in common than meets the eye. Welcome to
Speaker 2: cat Happen Here. I'm Andrew's Sage or andrewsm on YouTube,
Speaker 2: and I'm joined today by Garrison Davis. Hello, Welcome, Welcome.
Speaker 2: So my goal is to try and understand these mounds
Speaker 2: through the lens of ideological totalism, which was a specific
Speaker 2: theoretical framework developed by Robert Jlifton to identify the outcome
Speaker 2: of a successful thought reform process, characterized by Denesturish and
Speaker 2: Tim Wolforth In on the Edge as a quote mode
Speaker 2: of absolute conviction, which embeds ideas so deeply in people's
Speaker 2: heads that they grow inoculated against doubt. Ideas cease to
Speaker 2: be provisional theories about the world and instead become secret
Speaker 2: convictions dependent on the word of how old authorities for
Speaker 2: their validation rather than evidence end quote. Lifton saw the
Speaker 2: potential for the emergence of ideological totalism within everyone, but
Speaker 2: he noted quote totalistic convictions are most likely to occur
Speaker 2: with those ideologies which are most sweeping in their content
Speaker 2: and most ambitious or messianic in their claims, whether religious, political,
Speaker 2: or scientific. The eight criteria that identified for thought reform
Speaker 2: were milieu control, which is the control of communication and
Speaker 2: information within the environment. Mystical manipulation, which is the orchestrating
Speaker 2: of spontaneous events to save the group's message. The demand
Speaker 2: for purity, which divides the world into black and white,
Speaker 2: good and evil categories. The cult of confession, which pushes
Speaker 2: members to confess past sins and personal feelings to the group.
Speaker 2: The secret science, which elevates the group's dogma to an
Speaker 2: unquestionable truth. Loading the language, which is using jargon or
Speaker 2: cliches to minimize critical thinking. Doctrine over a person, which
Speaker 2: subordinates individual experiences and identity to the group's beliefs, and finally,
Speaker 2: the dispensing of existence, declaring that only those in the
Speaker 2: group have the right to exist. Now, not all of
Speaker 2: these factors may be at play for each of these
Speaker 2: specific movements that I would have mentioned, but we still
Speaker 2: see the outcome of this ideological totalism in each of
Speaker 2: these movements, to a very an extent, the systematic erosion
Speaker 2: of individual autonomy in favor of an unassailable authority. Whether
Speaker 2: we're speaking about Isis or Armshriakio, or Christian Zionism within
Speaker 2: the evangelical movement, or in any other case, we will
Speaker 2: see how movements replace individual identity with a collective proground
Speaker 2: persona where loaded language and thought terminating cliches make dissent
Speaker 2: literally unthinkable, where the enemy other is manufactured, and where
Speaker 2: power is concentrated so tightly that the leader or the
Speaker 2: dogma becomes the only source of truth. So the foundation
Speaker 2: of ideological totalism is the destruction of nuance. To build
Speaker 2: a cohesive US and them, they must be clearly defined
Speaker 2: and definitionally polarized. First comes the categorization, where the complexity
Speaker 2: of human identity is reduced into a single non negotiable trait,
Speaker 2: be it religion or nationality or idea geology, and then
Speaker 2: comes to humanization, which is stripping the other of human qualities,
Speaker 2: transforming them from a person into a threat, impure, an infidel,
Speaker 2: and obstacle. And finally there's enclosure, which creates social or
Speaker 2: psychological walls that prevent the US from interacting with them.
Speaker 2: This ensures the only information the group receives is that
Speaker 2: of the others perceived malice. In the context of groups
Speaker 2: like Isis, the US versus Them engine is expressed both
Speaker 2: ideologically and through physical violence. By committing act of terror,
Speaker 2: the group forces the rest of the world to recognize
Speaker 2: their boundary. There's no cross contamination to be had with
Speaker 2: the infidel world, no middle ground. You're either a part
Speaker 2: of their struggle for a global caliphate or you're an
Speaker 2: enemy to be eradicated, whether you consider yourself a Muslim
Speaker 2: or anything else. With arm serikio, the cults us versus
Speaker 2: them engine operated through isolation in communes and the severan
Speaker 2: excit donal ties them was defined as the corrupted world
Speaker 2: or the spiritually dead, and the group sought purity and enlightenment,
Speaker 2: so They targeted the individual's existing social networks, family friends,
Speaker 2: mainstream society, labeling them as sources of contamination. By cutting
Speaker 2: off the member from the outside world, the culton showed
Speaker 2: that the only reality that existed was the one provided
Speaker 2: by the leader. Were the political religious Christian Zionists. The
Speaker 2: US versus Them engine is built through a historical and
Speaker 2: eschatological narrative that sees the entire secular world as enemies
Speaker 2: to the apocalyptic ambitions of Christ's return. They are frequently
Speaker 2: warned to avoid worldly influences, temptations from the devil that
Speaker 2: might skew them from the righteous path. The other in
Speaker 2: all these cases is successfully stripped of their humanity. The
Speaker 2: destruction of the them becomes a logical necessity for the
Speaker 2: survival of the US and the isolation, and shows the
Speaker 2: group's total control over an individual's interpretation of reality.
Speaker 3: Interesting how all these various cultish elements build on or
Speaker 3: use the techniques written about by like Karl Schmidt the
Speaker 3: frind enemy distinction, and how like creating groups like this,
Speaker 3: you know you have to choose like a border point,
Speaker 3: to choose the point that determines what we are and
Speaker 3: what our enemy is, and then in order to keep
Speaker 3: your group active or like safe, that border has to
Speaker 3: be moved, has to always be like like pushing. It
Speaker 3: can't actually stay at the same point. And then you
Speaker 3: see that movement with all these groups, right, they have
Speaker 3: this like milleneriness, like apocalyptic focus, but they're still like
Speaker 3: moving towards this like larger enemy population.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean you see it in like I mentioned,
Speaker 2: Isis has erected this barrier that separates them even from
Speaker 2: Mostlims who may share some of their other religious convictions
Speaker 2: but do not share their political ambitions. Yeah, you see
Speaker 2: what the evangelical movement, which distinguishes themselves from other Christian
Speaker 2: sects as being heretical or not fully committed to the wood,
Speaker 2: or have gone astray in some way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean you can see that with the evangelical
Speaker 3: leaders and like the president picking fights with the literal
Speaker 3: pope of the Catholic Church.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, the beef between the Catholics and the
Speaker 2: Protestants go kind of kind of far back. You suppose
Speaker 2: at least share this scripture or this overarch in like
Speaker 2: religious roomwork, and yet there's still a desire to delineate,
Speaker 2: to separate, to define an enemy even within that cohort.
Speaker 3: And a lot of those like current differences that do
Speaker 3: relate to like military action in the Middle East and
Speaker 3: what's happening in Palestine, like specifically. And I found that
Speaker 3: to be an interesting connection as you're as you're talking about,
Speaker 3: you know, specifically like Christian Zionists and how the situation
Speaker 3: in the Middle East is extremely important for their apocalyptic worldview,
Speaker 3: and that is like one of the key differences between
Speaker 3: between like evangelical Christians and you know, the current stuff
Speaker 3: like that that the Pope is saying, which is very
Speaker 3: much opposed to what's happening in the Middle East.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because they've constructed this very robust eschatological framework, which
Speaker 2: is the next thing that I wanted to get into.
Speaker 2: The language that these movements use helps to control their people.
Speaker 2: They're controlling people not just through physical barriers, but through
Speaker 2: psychological barriers. Yeah, if you can control the vocabulary available
Speaker 2: to a person, how a person understands the meaning of words,
Speaker 2: how they understand the meaning of their scriptures, you can
Speaker 2: control the range of thoughts that they're capable of having.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: That was kind of the point that has cliched this
Speaker 2: point is the point that George Orwell's and when they
Speaker 2: had the Ministry of Truth in nineteen eighty four, that
Speaker 2: you limit even language available so that even dissent cannot
Speaker 2: be fully expressed. You don't have to censor anybody because
Speaker 2: you've already censored their minds.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you see that even their own creation of
Speaker 3: like phrases and terms across all these groups, Like they
Speaker 3: come up with specific terms of phrase, they just get repeated.
Speaker 3: And that just starts like replacing language if it starts
Speaker 3: filling in the gap of language and communication. So thought
Speaker 3: terminating cliches.
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly thought to any cliches, and also just a
Speaker 2: broader cognitive enclosure. So in the case of Shinriqu, you
Speaker 2: had the group using this dense pseudo scientific and pseudo
Speaker 2: religious jargon that blended spirituality, quantum physics biology, and those
Speaker 2: who are most elevated in that group were able to
Speaker 2: wield that language and make themselves sound so sophisticated and
Speaker 2: elevated and on a higher plane of truth and reality.
Speaker 2: That made it very easy for them to swindle people
Speaker 2: within their circle. It created a linguistic barrier of the entry,
Speaker 2: so that you couldn't participate even in the group's truth
Speaker 2: without committing to the incomprehensible dogma.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And if you don't commit to the incomprehensible dogma, then
Speaker 2: you just you don't get it. You're going to be
Speaker 2: an outside of fever. You are not enlightened, you are
Speaker 2: outside of the truth.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And this this is a problem across a lot of
Speaker 3: a lot of different groups, in concluding groups that are
Speaker 3: not this, you know, apocalyptic or fascist or like religiously based,
Speaker 3: but they even see versions of this among like the
Speaker 3: contemporary left, yeah, which creates like, yeah, this like barrier
Speaker 3: to entry by using certain like phrases like academic language.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and and very idiosyncratic definitions of words that have
Speaker 2: otherwise common definitions yeah.
Speaker 3: No. And and how much politics is like this subcultural
Speaker 3: purpose of like maintaining a certain like subgroup like a
Speaker 3: social circle, versus actually building like mass politics, And how
Speaker 3: leadiosyncratic small like purity of groups with their special language
Speaker 3: and these like barriers to entry makes it very hard
Speaker 3: to do larger political organizing that actually goes towards like
Speaker 3: a working class movement.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Liftin points out that there is a tendency for ideological
Speaker 2: totalism in a lot of movements as as I had
Speaker 2: have mentioned, so something we have to be on God
Speaker 2: for if we want to avoid falling into these traps.
Speaker 2: And so we look at the example of Amiki in
Speaker 2: this case, but Isis also has a kind of a
Speaker 2: total elimination of nuance through polarized, emotionally charged vocabulary. And
Speaker 2: you have the believer, and you have the infidel, which
Speaker 2: again includes fellow Muslims, you have the peol, and you
Speaker 2: have the corrupt. Every dynamic, every binary is zero sum.
Speaker 2: You know, you either with de califate or you're an
Speaker 2: enemy of God to be wiped out. And within the
Speaker 2: eschatological framework of Christian Zionism, opposing the apocalyptic informed geopolitical
Speaker 2: ambitions is tantamount opposing God's plan. You know, it's like,
Speaker 2: how dare you They use these thought terminating cliches as
Speaker 2: you would have mentioned, things like it is written, it's
Speaker 2: in revelation. You know, it's God's will, and there's no
Speaker 2: way to actually challenge their policies or actions in their
Speaker 2: minds on whether it be humanitarian, legal, or logical grounds,
Speaker 2: because it's like you speaking Greek, I mean, doing something
Speaker 2: like that is like arguing with God. It's like attacking
Speaker 2: their faith, and so we also see these movements stripping
Speaker 2: individuals of the agency for the sake of a transaction,
Speaker 2: the exchange of these self with all its very real
Speaker 2: vulnerabilities and mortality and earth limitations, for a higher purpose
Speaker 2: that is eat you know, and absolute. In the case
Speaker 2: of Amgenrikiu, the destruction of the self was achieved through
Speaker 2: the redefinition of morality that used a distorted interpretation of
Speaker 2: Vadaryana Buddhism and placed the Master's will above all conventional ethics.
Speaker 2: To follow the Master and achieve spiritual evolution, one had
Speaker 2: to abandon the ego with its moral compass and its
Speaker 2: human attachments, and in its place armation. IQ offered the
Speaker 2: merit of absolute obedience. By following their leader's commands, even
Speaker 2: those of mass violence that would expose the wider will
Speaker 2: to their threat. The practitioner believed that they were performing
Speaker 2: a ritual act of spiritual cleansing to become an instrument
Speaker 2: of a higher cosmic order. You see the same thing
Speaker 2: with the rise of isis the destruction of the self
Speaker 2: achieved through the total absorption of the individual into the monolith.
Speaker 2: The individuals stripped to their specific context whatever nationality or
Speaker 2: background they may have had, and being reduced to a singular,
Speaker 2: functional component of the struggle being given up purpose that
Speaker 2: was compensated with the promise of eternal significance, the promise
Speaker 2: of martyrdom, of fighting and dying for the caliphate, and
Speaker 2: with that the individual could bypass the mundane struggles of
Speaker 2: earthly life to secure a police in a permanent, divine reality.
Speaker 2: And the political theological sphere of Christian Zionism, the destruction
Speaker 2: of the self has more to do with relinquishing the
Speaker 2: selfs agency and become an instrumentalized for the sake of
Speaker 2: God's plan by Freeman Israel's ascendants in the Middle East
Speaker 2: as an essential precursor to the Second Coming of Christ,
Speaker 2: and when everything in their power to lobby for and
Speaker 2: support it, the movement disregards the genocidal costs for the
Speaker 2: reward being the fulfillment of a divine apocalyptic timeline. And
Speaker 2: so in all three cases, the follower is convinced that
Speaker 2: the destruction of this world as they know it, and
Speaker 2: the destruction of the self within it is not a tragedy,
Speaker 2: but actually a kind of liberation. But all three of
Speaker 2: these movements of tragedies for the rest of the world.
Speaker 2: Armisian Rekio deployed chemical weapons in Tokyo subway system. They
Speaker 2: killed thirteen people and injured over fifty eight hundred others,
Speaker 2: instill in a long term anxiety for those who live
Speaker 2: in the city that their shared space could be the
Speaker 2: site of potential terror and the person sitting next to
Speaker 2: you could be the vessel for a hidden lethal ideology.
Speaker 2: Isis has forcibly displaced millions, killed tens of thousands, and
Speaker 2: destroyed ancient heritage sites, all in an effort to erase
Speaker 2: the other, and the Middle East and Africa in particular
Speaker 2: continued to be scarred by its violence. Christian Zionist ideology
Speaker 2: has introduced a variable to the political equation that is
Speaker 2: immune to reason and negotiation, that cannot question its theological justifications.
Speaker 2: Of course, Zionism is not entirely dependent on Christian Zionis support.
Speaker 2: You know, Jewish colonial settlements would have predated British support,
Speaker 2: American support, and Christian Zionis support. But the political cosign
Speaker 2: that Christian Zionis provide within the premier superpower does aid
Speaker 2: in the continued support for the Palestinian genocide. So ideological
Speaker 2: totalism seeks to eliminate pluralism, to eliminate shared truth, and
Speaker 2: to literally kill. But we should not view the rise
Speaker 2: of totalizing ideologies as some freak, isolated phenomenon, because it
Speaker 2: deprives its strength from the very framework and conditioning embedded
Speaker 2: in our existent social structures. The mechanisms of miliu control,
Speaker 2: loading the language, and other techniques used by cultic tendencies
Speaker 2: exist in subtle forms within our mainstream institutions. We see
Speaker 2: the seeds of thought or form in the echo chambers
Speaker 2: of media ecosystems. We see the loading of language in
Speaker 2: the polarized rhetoric of politics. We see the demand for
Speaker 2: purity in the most aggressive forms of cultural and religious tribalism.
Speaker 2: The extremist can sometimes be the most honest, uninhibited expression,
Speaker 2: the natural endpoint of our world's authoritarian tendencies and subtle
Speaker 2: lifelong conditioning. At home, in the classroom, at work in
Speaker 2: civic life, we are trained in the soft versions of
Speaker 2: the very deference that totalize and leaders eventually demand. We
Speaker 2: are conditioned to respect authority without question, to prioritize the
Speaker 2: greater good of the institution over individual agency, and to
Speaker 2: accept official narratives as the only valid reality. So when
Speaker 2: a leader arrives who promises to replace the complex messyan
Speaker 2: certainty of our political and social reality with the clarity
Speaker 2: of absolute truth, the most conditioned minds naturally find the
Speaker 2: offer at a seductive and so this disease caught through
Speaker 2: social conditioning must be treated by a fundamental reclamation of
Speaker 2: the individual's capacity for critical thought and autonomy. We have
Speaker 2: to move beyond the mere consumption of information to the
Speaker 2: active interrogation of it. This means cultivating the ability to
Speaker 2: recognize the traps of thought reform, the logical fallacies, the
Speaker 2: loading of the language, to recognize when an ideology is
Speaker 2: attempting to bypass our reason in favor of or emotions.
Speaker 2: The primary defense against thought reform is the refusal so
Speaker 2: that any authority, religious, political, or otherwise becomes secret and
Speaker 2: beyond the question.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that point that you made towards the
Speaker 3: end there, But like this thing just being the most
Speaker 3: visible consequence of the contradictions of our current social system
Speaker 3: is like really important. Is because yeah, I mean, we're
Speaker 3: all sorting through the same sorts of causes that produced
Speaker 3: groups like this, or produce the people that move into
Speaker 3: groups like this, and we might sort these out in
Speaker 3: different ways, but in the way that they do it,
Speaker 3: it's not fully alien. It's just it's just a very
Speaker 3: visible outward manifestation of the same sorts of internal contradictions,
Speaker 3: and like fascism feeds on these same things. You can
Speaker 3: see how much fascism like overlaps with a lot of
Speaker 3: stuff that.
Speaker 4: You're talking about here, yep.
Speaker 3: And it seemed kind of like suicidal tendencies, this destruction
Speaker 3: of the self, right, that is, that is dealing with
Speaker 3: those with those same sorts of like social tensions and
Speaker 3: internal contradictions that produce like outbursts of antisocial behavior like
Speaker 3: this or in some cases like genocidal behavior.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I think it's very much resultant. Oh, there's
Speaker 2: the structure of our old system. You know, the stresses,
Speaker 2: the anxiety, is the pains and pressure points, and you know,
Speaker 2: we are all different as individuals, and I think that
Speaker 2: some people respond to these conditions in ways that are
Speaker 2: very much either self destructive externally destructive for both.
Speaker 3: I think a part of our task in like a
Speaker 3: general sense, is providing some alternative to this. Right you
Speaker 3: can like look at the way the really like on
Speaker 3: like a global level, like the left has really receded
Speaker 3: a lot in the past fifty sixty seventy years, and
Speaker 3: that that leaves a lot of you know, people who
Speaker 3: are who are trying to look for this for this
Speaker 3: sort of purpose, Right, They're trying to understand the contradictions
Speaker 3: of the world, and there may not be a humanistic
Speaker 3: option for that, so it gets directed into much more
Speaker 3: destructive ways. Sometimes you can see like what happened in
Speaker 3: Rajava with like democratic con federalism as like, right, they
Speaker 3: they actually did that, right, They they saw what was
Speaker 3: needed and they did it. And it's directly opposing the
Speaker 3: sort of alternative version which is which is isis which
Speaker 3: is like super interesting, Right, but I think we have
Speaker 3: we have the same problem here, but we don't really
Speaker 3: have a strong and strong like alternative to that, right,
Speaker 3: like a healthy, a healthy and growing like working class movement,
Speaker 3: which it attempts to actually solve the sort of sort
Speaker 3: of problems that are in the world that these sorts
Speaker 3: of other things like feed on. Right, they grab onto
Speaker 3: these onto these very very present problems and apply an
Speaker 3: emotionally soothing response to it, even if it is self destructive.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the work of building an alternative and demonstrating it
Speaker 2: and showing people live in it, I think is very
Speaker 2: very important.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I also think that when you consider the fact that
Speaker 2: the whole mark of totalizing systems is the elimination of
Speaker 2: the other and the criminalization of descent our antidotes, our
Speaker 2: alternative has to embrace. It has to be committed to
Speaker 2: the adversity of thought and expression. And I also think
Speaker 2: that it has to be willing to sit with conflict,
Speaker 2: to sit with tensions. Yeah, two, allow them to in
Speaker 2: ate with each other without trying to just override it
Speaker 2: with some false unity.
Speaker 3: Those tensions in conflict are like important and that is
Speaker 3: that is how we will develop our thought and develop
Speaker 3: our movement forward.
Speaker 4: You have to you have to have those tensions. You
Speaker 4: have to have.
Speaker 3: That that conflict and disagreement which will hopefully produce more
Speaker 3: positive outcomes.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Hopefully. It's it's generative conflict and exbstructive conflict.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, and some conflicts can be generative if we
Speaker 2: accept that they can't be resolved.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think part of what makes some conflicts destructive is
Speaker 2: this effort to kind of uh just paint over them
Speaker 2: with some kumbaya sense of oh well, just well, you
Speaker 2: just unify like that's not consequential, or we'll figure it out,
Speaker 2: or that's just how it is. And I think we, Yeah,
Speaker 2: we have to be willing to be uncomfortable with not
Speaker 2: having the answers and maybe never having the answers. In
Speaker 2: some cases. There are those who I think will have
Speaker 2: the capacity to engage into deradicalization of ideological totalists. I
Speaker 2: don't think I'm among them, and I think that there
Speaker 2: are others that we can gear outreach towards. Yes, I
Speaker 2: get irritated sometimes when I see people who believe that
Speaker 2: the focus of our attention right now, as people trying
Speaker 2: to build an alternative, trying to build a better tomorrow,
Speaker 2: that our focus should be on trying to deradicalize right wingers. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the vast majority of people are politically unaffiliated, politically uncommitted, apathetic, disengaged,
Speaker 2: and I think that we can do far more if
Speaker 2: we were to focus on reaching those people and helping
Speaker 2: those people see the problems with this system and the
Speaker 2: solutions that we have on offer than engaging in fruit
Speaker 2: that's to beat with right wing hounzol.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think that's actually the most effective form
Speaker 3: of deradicalization, exactly, exactly. There is a lot of problems
Speaker 3: with the sort of like deradicalization framework that emerge in
Speaker 3: like twenty eighteen to kind of meet the rise of
Speaker 3: like the alt right. A lot of it doesn't work,
Speaker 3: a lot of it can be fruitless, but there is
Speaker 3: like a noble intention behind it, and I think the
Speaker 3: best way to actually do that is by just providing
Speaker 3: a healthy alternative that does appeal to most people.
Speaker 4: It doesn't.
Speaker 3: It doesn't need to be catered towards someone who's on
Speaker 3: like the right or like the far right, because in
Speaker 3: a lot of cases, those people are suffering from the
Speaker 3: same sorts of problems that the rest of people are.
Speaker 3: They've just found of a false solution for it, and
Speaker 3: so if you're able to provide a better solution, a
Speaker 3: lot of them will move over. There's really very few
Speaker 3: that are like through and tried, like ideologically committed, right,
Speaker 3: There's some, and they're maybe very vocal on the Internet,
Speaker 3: but that's that's not actually like most.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and also the let is at least half boughts
Speaker 2: at this point, so yeah, you know, you take some
Speaker 2: of those Internet discussions with a grain of salt in
Speaker 2: terms of being representative of any population significantly. But I
Speaker 2: did have some tips with regard to outreach for those
Speaker 2: who may have a special interest in it or maybe
Speaker 2: have a loved one that they really want to help
Speaker 2: where they see being immersed in an ideologically totalistic environment.
Speaker 2: For one, directly attacking a person's core beliefs are going
Speaker 2: to trigger something called the backfire effect, which is where
Speaker 2: contradictory evidence actually strengthens their conviction because their identity is
Speaker 2: not fused to the ideology, so an attack on the
Speaker 2: idea is perceived as a mortal attack on this self.
Speaker 2: Debating them is not going to help. It's better to
Speaker 2: think of yourself more as a connecting force rather than
Speaker 2: a correcting.
Speaker 4: Your a lifeline, Yeah, to.
Speaker 2: Gently guide them out of their radical mindset rather than
Speaker 2: trying to instruct them out of it. To be rate
Speaker 2: them out of it. And when you notice that their
Speaker 2: experience and doubt in their ideas, it can be very
Speaker 2: exciting to try and Russian and show them the way,
Speaker 2: but you don't want to overwhelm them. Doubt, especially for
Speaker 2: people immersed in that mindset, might literally collapse their entire
Speaker 2: social and cognitive world. So your focus, I think, needs
Speaker 2: to be unprovided a safe harbor where their doubts can
Speaker 2: be expressed freely, without judgment or any pressure to immediately
Speaker 2: betray all that they've ever known. You also need to
Speaker 2: consider the conditions that led the person into that situation
Speaker 2: in the first place. If you know what they were
Speaker 2: like and what their situation was like prior to indoctrination,
Speaker 2: whether they had certain relationship issues, financial issues, systemic abuses.
Speaker 2: Try isolation, some kind of unine for meaning or purpose
Speaker 2: that can help you contextualize the situation. And while you
Speaker 2: can always fundamentally disagree with their conclusions, it's good to
Speaker 2: recognize the needs that drove them to those conclusions. But
Speaker 2: in addition to that, you can try to find out
Speaker 2: what their passions and hobbies will or are outside of
Speaker 2: that doctrine, so they have some kind of psychological landing
Speaker 2: pad if they were to escape the environment, so they're
Speaker 2: not without a sense of self, so they're not floundering
Speaker 2: for some form of identity. These movements and this tendency
Speaker 2: for ideological totalism derived from hierarchy, will not be overcome
Speaker 2: in one fell swoop. It is a continuous daily struggle
Speaker 2: within the human mind and the social fabric. It's a
Speaker 2: struggle to remain unconditioned by the temptations of certainty to
Speaker 2: the messy, the diverse, the complex, to create a social
Speaker 2: foundation of individuals who are capable of saying nope, and that's.
Speaker 4: It for me.
Speaker 2: All power to all the people. Peace.
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