When the herd enjoys agreeing with itself too much, any truth that upsets their consensus becomes a threat. 🔑 This is when a dissenting minority becomes the canary in the coal mine: the more viciously they’re attacked, the more intense the groupthink.

Once you know how to be curious and open minded—willing to fully grapple with a topic and find out you’re wrong—the intense desperation to force a one’s view on everything and everyone that’s so common today is disturbing. It’s like seeing people willingly handicap themselves.

Brianna Wu Learn more about Jabotinsky: x.com/JosephJakeKlei…

🔎 Are the groups you trust leading you to make worse decisions? It's an overlooked but universal danger that Yale psychologist Irving Janis tried to warn about through his research on groupthink.

Groupthink happens when a group values agreement over truth. The resulting pressure to conform suppresses doubt and dissent, often letting bad ideas go unchallenged.

Janis defined groupthink as: 🧠 “a mode of thinking in cohesive groups where striving for unanimity overrides realistic appraisal of alternatives.” In short, fixating on consensus blinds us to bad ideas, which is dangerous in any decision-making context.

📖Groupthink isn’t just an abstract concept. It leads to catastrophic mistakes in all parts of life, from bullying to mass murder. Valuing dissent and the freedom to challenge any “consensus” are the best defenses we have, but they're increasingly unpopular.

The people who grew up hearing "don't trust strangers on the internet" have ironically failed to apply this warning because para-social relationships tricked them into believing the people they follow online aren't still strangers.

If I was an alien from another planet, you could probably never convince me that it would be so hard to get humans to believe that freedom is good. It’s a mystery you have to witness with your own eyes.

"As I found when activists tried to redefine “racism,” while much of their target audience went along with it unaware of the bait-and-switch, many went the other way and became racists. This was an entirely predictable result." Joseph (Jake) Klein The Black Sheep

Political tribalism lowers the standards you hold yourself to. Instead of striving for truth and your own values, you strive more for praise from your fellow tribe members with similarly low standards. It's a feedback loop that drags you lower and lower.

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

"Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature." - Benjamin Franklin

I enjoy chatting with people who can discuss political topics issue by issue rather than immediately condemn everything that comes from a single side. This doesn't mean you never take a side, but you're taking a side on specific issues, not entire groups of people.

The person constantly engaged in defending their ideas has little time leftover to question and expand those ideas.