Indoctrinated parents indoctrinate kids.
See also: religion.
I’m just perplexed how kids are still religious in 2024 with vast amount of free information out there. I thought this cult bullshit was about to end with my generation when we got free, unrestricted information exchange invented.
I guess you can’t fix irrationality with rationality huh
From my perspective its because people won’t change their beliefs unless they stop benefiting the believer. For people who live in a religious community, there church’s sunday social event is enjoyable, there friends are all religious, there denomination provides a entire moral framework and worldview they don’t even need to think about. Confirmation bias plays a major role in preventing alternate thought to block out other worldviews.
Only when someone does not gain much benefit from there religion or has a important part of there religion proven wrong, can they process alternative ideologies and either switch to a more useful denomination or stop believing entirely.
Yep I have a friend who joined a church after not going to one for years because of the social aspects of it. Lots of people their age to relate to.
We just need better secular groups to join with those benefits that aren’t tied to religion. It’s one of the reasons I’m always apprehensive about volunteering because I don’t want the connection to religion. I know it doesn’t matter my intent for those who benefit/what benefits from the volunteering, but it affects my long term commitment to the cause.
Its a shame as well because many of the old social places such as rotary club and the masonic lodges have died out, and the new “third places” are online and/or expensive to access (vrchat comes to mind). Its no wonder so many people use social media these days.
That’s taking it too far, in my opinion. I realize it’s supremely unpopular to be a person of faith nowadays, especially online, but you can’t say that anyone with faith is stupid and it’s all bullshit as a blanket statement. You don’t know what happens after we die, and neither do I. I can’t prove that God definitely exists and I’ll probably never convince you of it, but by the same token, you can’t prove that God doesn’t exist.
Where we diverge is I think it’s okay that you believe that. And yes, of course you can point out the shitty people that use religion to persecute and restrict others’ rights, to punish, and worse. Many people do this, but they are still the vocal minority we hear about. And it’s not like there haven’t been terrible atheists/agnostics who have done awful things not motivated by religion…
Me, personally, I also won’t attend any church that tries to be political or tell its members how to vote. I am a Christian, but I try to model my religious activity on the Sikhs: quiet, respectful, loving outreach to improve the world. So I can acknowledge the problems, but no, I don’t think all religion is bad nor every person of faith stupid…
Edit: spelling
They didn’t say stupid, you did. They said irrational, which it is. You’re right no one can prove that there is no afterlife, but believing in something that there is no evidence for is the definition of irrational. That doesn’t mean I’m saying you’re stupid, I’m just saying that it’s irrational. No need to get offended, that’s just what words mean.
And remember that it’s not an insult. Even a lot of science depends on taking an irrational position to discover things. Doing irrational things in life can sometimes be way more rewarding than doing rational things.
Trying to explain to someone that their take is not evidence-based though… most jump to the conclusion that you’re saying they’re wrong.
It’s not the belief that makes you “stupid” is the irrationality of the whole package. If you’re looking for metaphysics answers - we got them. People tried to figure out this stuff since the beginning of time with rationality and logic and even experiments rather than blind faith to words they never even heard personally. That’s the difference.
I don’t discriminate against the religious but it’s really easy to argue that reglious approach is taking the easy approach to metaphysics and it’s something important to consider here.
Inoculating believers against rational counter-arguments is a powerful tool. Do it right, and the vast amount of information at their fingertips might seem like the whole secular world is conspiring against them.
Most people are not actually people, they are people-like imposter automatons and they are dumb as hell and can be manipulated like clay.
Religion is not always a cult. All religions are not like Christianity.
See Hinduism, Buddhism, confussionism
If I didn’t know about the Hindus and Muslims “beefing” (pun intended) in India, I’d be inclined to believe you.
Nah, religion is always a cult.
Imo cults have more to do with in-groups and out-groups and their relation in your mental space.
If your in-group is worth more to you than the total sum of all out-groups; you are in a cult.
Humanity is one race, subdividing it and labelling all the chunks is where we went wrong. The fact we have a word to describe this outcome shows we are pretty far down this tube.
If you’re reading this and think to yourself “surely this person is misled, they’re not a part of (insert religion) so wouldn’t know anything about what they say” congratulations, you’re right (and also in a cult).
Nah they’re still cults. People have this morphed view that religion is not a cult when it is by the very definition of it:
cult n: followers of an exclusive system of religious beliefs and practices
Not to say that cults can’t be net good in some form but once they grow past local community I think it’s just impossible to not lose the mission to bad actors.
I prefer this view. Limiting the definition of cults to “small” or “based around a person” is missing the point that all religions are self-preserving in-groups that offer “truths” that will limit your worldview by excluding others, and practices that differentiate followers behaviorally.
But also beliefs can be useful. For example, the idea of an afterlife or reincarnation can help reduce the fear of death. The belief of forgiveness for sins, can offer redemption. That random events have meaning. That we are not alone when we are alone. All cognitively useful and therapeutic.
Opposing beliefs can be held at the same time. I can know that probabilistically, or based on personal experience, or empirical evidence, that death is either an ending or an unknowable, and still choose to believe in reincarnation because it does give more meaning to my actions and reduce fear of death.
And cult practices are often as good for the individual as the beliefs. Having community and regular social interaction is critical to human health. Conducting rituals and ceremonies give structure, meaning and comfort to the parts of our days and lives. Praying and meditating. Charity and service and on and on. These are all useful, healthy to the individual and to society.
When we can learn to adopt these things without closing our minds to other worldviews and possibilities, without in-group fear and defensiveness, without superiority and proselytization we’ll be in a better world that’s still full of cults
I disagree that irrational beliefs can be net good. Belief in the afterlife isn’t the only way to make peace with death, but the normalization of magical thinking makes people easier to deceive and more likely to try alternative-solutions (as opposed to vaccination or chemotherapy).
I understand your point, but I think that magical and mythical thinking are fully part of how our minds evolved and still work, and if we fully develop our faculties of rationalization, almost everyone still thinks magically. Think about ideas like luck, or a fear of something improbable, or most of our expectations in life. Or why many masters of logic still believe in mythical beings and afterlives.
If you talk to someone from an animistic culture, they don’t need to question or have a structure of reasoning in place to explain why the waterfall has a spirit. It just does, it always has and it’s obvious. However, if a person who lives in a wealthy country today, had public education and believes that vaccines are dangerous. They will believe it rationally, not irrationally, and have a slew of rationalizations for the belief. These are two types of magical thinking, but the former has a magical worldview and the latter does not.
Rationality is weak against many types of thinking and motivation, and there are many more steps in the maturation of a mind. I do personally agree that a solid foundation in rational thinking should underlie whatever beliefs, morals, ethics, and insights a person adopts. But it is also highly likely that in my examples the former person is healthier and happier than the latter person, and both could be just as gullible.
Hinduism is the textbook definition of a cult. It’s just old AF, so we give it a pass.
How tho
It still pushes the “us vs them” mentality that any religion does, which in my opinion makes it no better than others. And truth be told, scripture and dogma has nothing to do with it either, it’s all just tribalism.
The Indian government under Modi pushes a nationalist Hindu agenda which encourages violence against religious minorities like Muslims and Sikhs. This causes religious extremism, directed towards establishing a national Hindu religion in India like you see with Islam and Judaism in the Middle East.
And before anyone says Buddhism is different (I was raised in a Buddhist household, to clarify), see Myanmar’s conflict with the Rohingya which is perpetuated by militant Buddhists. Sri Lanka has also long been dealing with similar acts of violence against the Tamil Hindus and Arab Muslims perpetuated by the Sinhalese Buddhist majority.
Any religion has the propensity to become “cult-like” based on social circumstances, and this is heightened all the more when nationalism is thrown into the mix.
I suggest you look up Kali for a start.
The name of a single character from their religious stories tells me nothing about their behavior
She’s a god, represents time, change, power, creation, preservation, destruction…she’s a mother figure… You haven’t given me any useful information. Maybe give a link or something with information about her relevance to cult behavior?
Hmph. Maybe look up “Hinduism is a cult” and then scroll until you read a preview that fits my beliefs
Kali Linux?
Linux is definitely a cult, and I am a proud cultist
free
Uh…?
Exactly. My nephews seem to complain about the shit their dad told them to vote for. It’s rather hilarious.
The fuck happened to the rebelliousness of youth?
Should kids be doing exactly not whatever their parents tell them to?
Kids these days… GET ON MY LAWN!!
The fuck happened to the rebelliousness of youth?
Pure propaganda. Kids are more than happy to follow behind their older peers and always have been.
It’s “rebellion” if the kids literally anything at all. Speak up? Question anything? Show any kind of agency? Mimic what your elders are doing? You’re out of control.
They might think they’re rebelling against the normality of voting for basic human kindness and decency.
How do you indoctrinate the curiosity out of people? 😬
Well, if you question it, you are a bad person and going to hell. It’s not that God doesn’t love you, but you are forcing God to send you to hell because you are choosing to question.
See also: reactionary movements.
I sometimes really want to show those reactionary gamers a trial version of the authoritarian society they stive for…
So send them a documentary on what happened in NAZI Germany.
But don’t be surprised when they tell you that’s exactly what they want because they’re white men and it puts them at the top of the heirarchy.
But their geeky stuff wouldn’t survive any of that…
They won’t understand that until they’re in the middle of it.
It’s tough being young. Jobs don’t pay what they used to. Rent costs too much. Even the food is a struggle.
You know who is the blame for this?
Brown people.
This message is brought to you by the conservative party of your country. They’re all the fucking same.
Absolutely. All those Mexican undocumented immigrants doing the jobs for under minimum wage that nobody else wants are ruining everything right?
Being born into a conservative household can be a hard hurdle to clear. I grew up with the unquestioning belief that the left was straight-up evil (shocker: that was projection) but then moved around a ton and worked alongside a huge diversity of people after highschool cuz I joined the military and didn’t have a choice: that exposure was a real shock, but since our brains don’t like being wrong, I resisted it for a good while before finally acknowledging that I was acting like a moron and started thinking more critically about politics and what political decisions meant for my community.
Not everyone gets that healthy slap-to-their-senses. Doesn’t excuse shit, but that’s the ‘why’.
It’d be interesting to see some actual political metrics on other service members. The military is always seen as being SOLID red, and while yes it does lean that way, the tiny bubble of the military that was my personal field of view seemed maybe a 60-40 split; and I personally went in red, and separated borderline radical blue. I know at least a handful of others who did the same… no idea if it’s always been that way, or if this is a developing trend. Or if I happened to be stationed in an uncharacteristically blue slice of military. /shrug.
Every single person I know who has gotten out of the military has come out blue. With one (medically discharged) exception.
This is my exact story to a “t”. I grew up in a heavily conservative household, joined the military as a conservative, and 15 years later I’m pretty fucking blue.
I think it’s a combination of a few things that does it to us more often than not:
1 - Exposure to people from all walks of life/escaping your “bubble” 2 - Access to tax payer funded social programs that the rest of America desperately fucking needs and going “Why can’t taxes do this for EVERYONE!?” 3 - If you’ve been deployed to certain sections of the world, you see first-hand what unfettered religious extremism can potentially do to a country.
I’m happy to say, that at least for the Air Force, I’ve run into far, far more Active Duty Dems/Libs than I have any Repubs. Now, when the retired veteran GS employees come in, it’s a completely different story. My whole circle save one is fairly left-leaning, and the one who isnt is…fucking weird/all over the place on his stances.
Indoctrination, propaganda, alt-right playbook recruitment through targeting the disaffected… these aren’t young people who’ve turned to conservatism, they’ve been actively targeted by right wing factions in order to bolster their position.
Edit: Oh, and also Reagan era neo-liberals are the fucking worst and when they shit on progressives and their ideas, they basically push away people who would otherwise be politically left leaning.
To be fair if you’re anything past Boomer, at this point you should be too embarrassed to vote for any GOP candidate. When the party decided to support Trump—a guy with proven sexual assault charges, pending fraud charges, pending classified document charges, a penchant for insurrection that he happily acknowledges, and more and more video surfacing of him unable to be coherent, hopefully most everyone with any connection to reality has realized it’s time to kick him and the GOP to the curb.
The Boomers should be mortified. Their parents were the one who sacrificed their young adulthood to eliminate the Nazis 80 years ago. They’re spitting on their parents’ graves by supporting Trump.
The problem is, boomers are the most selfish generation. The other name for their generation is the Me Generation, because after the war, after the depression, their parents had done all the hard work, been through all the hard times, and started to get money and financial security and so they gave their children everything they wanted creating the absolute selfishness we see today. They don’t care a lick about their parents sacrifices because they had everything they ever wanted and for them it’s all about “me, me , me!”
I am always surprised at how little credit is given to the relentless onslaught of radical fascist propaganda over airwaves, in MSM, and online…all of which do their damnedest to reach young people, teens, and even primary school kids. Very few people have any idea how powerful AM radio and Salem Media Group are. These are all the result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Decades of “the ends justify the means” gritty antihero’s, doing what “needs” to be done.
Honestly its surprising how many people have beliefs they think are evil but just they alone can bear the moral cost to support it. Its why it doesn’t matter to some about Trumps crimes against democracy or rapes, they are just making “enlightened” real politic game theory decisions in there heads instead of understanding the value of ethical and honarable institutions.
At least that’s part of it. An over value of “accepting a little sin” to get what they want instead of accepting the nuance and boring reality of what it actually takes to build a better world.
For men, a lot of it has to do with personal frustration and several “sources” or “influencers” pointing to communism, cultural marxism, feminism, etc, as the culprits of everything bad going on. Attacking a scapegoat you’ve been led to believe is “the reason” you can’t get a job or a girlfriend is easy and emotionally satisfying.
Thinking, rationalizing and realizing how and why shit’s fucked up, down, left and right doesn’t fill you with good vibes.
If you want an honest answer, it’s that young boys are feeling left behind, and in many ways they are right. This is a longer video (~30min) but it seems in line with much of what I’ve been seeing, that the boys are not alright.
Essentially, as any system begins to give equality to all, it will appear as a loss for those who used to solely benefit from it. That said this is still something to take seriously.
The gender gap is reversed in several areas: in education girls do better than boys. There are more women in university than men. Real wealth of women has been rising while in many demographics (especially poor young men of color) wealth has been decreasing. This is not a 0 sum game, so these are real concerns. 75% of suicides are men, and in their notes it is common to see words like “useless” “unwanted” and “worthless”. They feel that the world is leaving them behind.
This trend is not happening to those in the elite class- that is still very much male dominated, however for many poor men without college degrees, their lives are no longer looking like what they were raised to expect. That same demographic is who you are more likely to see at a trump rally.
This is fertile ground for people like Tucker Carlson and Andrew Tate to bring these young men into their world view that women are taking away their futures.
This is where I would say men who are in places of being role models (teachers, mentors, fathers, coaches, pastors, etc…) need to come in and show that there is a new reality for men and that it’s not only okay, it’s better. Being a stay at home dad can be freeing as you may be able to pursue other interests. Showing what leadership is is important, but also showing how to work as a team and under the leadership of a woman is important too and can be fulfilling.
I’m an educator, and one thing I think about is that I want to teach the girls that men are not to be feared, and to teach the boys not to be men to be afraid of. There is a better future ahead, but only if we take action and support the next generation of boys as well as girls. Without this support, we are handing a large portion of disaffected youth to a toxic mindset that will have horrible consequences.
Oddly enough, I could see one of these boys looking at this post and thinking “the left doesn’t care about me, so why would I care about them?”
cultural marxism
As someone who lost a friend to that rabbit hole, I really think we should put that far right conspiracy theory between quotation marks when named alongside things that actually exist. Communism and feminism are real (even if they are perceived as demonic by these people, they still at least exist). “Cultural marxism” doesn’t even have entity, it’s just bullshit entirely made up by the usual grifters
It’s a Nazi dogwhistle.
But you don’t need a scapegoat. The problem is literally the billionaires. You only need a scapegoat to justify white supremacist hierarchy building.
It’s embarrassing for everyone gen x and after. It’s especially disappointing to see in gen z
Could have ended the comment after 4 words.
Biggest reason I see is religious indoctrination.
80s millennial here; I grew up with heavy religious indoctrinate and that’s a lame excuse. I went from extreme conservative to woke leftist in my 20s, because that’s when I started caring about being informed and began reading the news. Anyone who uses social news websites should have a natural inclination towards the left once they start to pay attention to what’s going on in the world. (For me it started with browsing digg, and then reddit.)
If you can’t see how blatantly evil conservatives are after spending many years on the internet then you’re willfully choosing to ignore what you don’t want to see. I know I did for most of my teens. I would “blame the liberal media” and then go in with my day.
That’s not entirely true. Social media now (and for a long while) shows people what they want to see. If you’re right wing then it will show posts that reinforce those beliefs. Social media isn’t picking sides, it’s trying to maximize view time and if that requires distributing misinformation then so be it.
These days, sure, but like I said, I’m a millennial born in the 80s, and formed most of my political beliefs during 2000s internet, before algorithms took over. So older people like me have even less of an excuse to be conservative.
A lot of our current brand of conservatism appeals to people’s notion of unfairness. People taking things from them. They have been told over and over that liberals are lazy and want to take things from them.
Remember that these are young people who don’t have a lot of experiences in adult life, but have experienced basic, uncomplicated unfairness. Fighting against that simple, unnuanced unfairness appeals to them.
It’s easier to be reactionary, and being reactionary leads to conservatism.
a few things seem to motivate young idiots into conservative thought:
MRA their daddy their rural background edgelord BS
Do not underestimate the power of algorithms. I feel like instagram or YouTube are constantly trying to pull me back into the far right rabbit hole.
I’m disappointed every time I see a potentially good argument ruined with kid-pidgin like ‘u’ and ‘r’. At that point, I feel as if it were written in crayon.
The medium matters.
