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Can Things Be Both Popular and Silenced?

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Re: Can Things Be Both Popular and Silenced?

#3

Post by montrose »

The word for the phenomenon he describes is "heresy." For example large numbers of fairly influential people in European history disagreed with official church doctrine, but had to keep quiet or risk persecution of various types.

E.g. Newton had qualms about the Trinity, but he could not talk openly about them, or he would have lost his fellowship at Oxford. (Ironically, he was a fellow Trinity College.)

Re: Can Things Be Both Popular and Silenced?

#5

Post by Radim »

> “That other monkey has status that should be my status!” – nobody ever went broke peddling that.

Well said. Who needs facts when you can fling shit at the opposing group?

It feels our older biological subsystems don't know what to do with the latest evolutionary upstart: rationality. Some tension there.

I like the distinction between "obviously true" and "common knowledge" the article draws:

> My favorite Soviet joke involves a man standing in the Moscow train station, handing out leaflets to everyone who passes by. Eventually, of course, the KGB arrests him—but they discover to their surprise that the leaflets are just blank pieces of paper. “What’s the meaning of this?” they demand. “What is there to write?” replies the man. “It’s so obvious!”

Coming from the former Soviet block, this is spot on. It's as if societies and social norms have inertia and strive for their own preservation, like an organism. Even at the cost of the individuals (people) who comprise them. In the extreme case, social norms can go against the interest of all individuals and still prevail, as the article points out. How weird!

Or not weird? I guess humans themselves are just such conglomerate of trillions of "individuals" (cells). We can do shit that hurts all of them, and they'll still comply. It's just weird to think of societies as "doing their own thing", because we're so grounded in our human-level perspective.

Re: Can Things Be Both Popular and Silenced?

#6

Post by oicie0uD »

montrose wrote: post #3

The word for the phenomenon he describes is "heresy." For example large numbers of fairly influential people in European history disagreed with official church doctrine, but had to keep quiet or risk persecution of various types. E.g. Newton had qualms about the Trinity, but he could not talk openly about them, or he would have lost his fellowship at Oxford. (Ironically, he was a fellow Trinity College.)

FTA:

The thing that’s new and exciting enough to get New York Times articles written about it is that the anti-PC movement has spread to friendly coastal liberals. From the Democrats’ perspective, the IDW aren’t infidels, they’re heretics.

Re: Can Things Be Both Popular and Silenced?

#8

Post by js8 »

Yes, they can be both popular and silenced.

Steven Pinker mentions in the Better Angels of Our Nature (and possibly also elsewhere) that a group of people (even relatively small one) can be in a situation where everybody disagrees with some policy, yet everybody follows it, because they believe that everybody else agrees with it.

That's why allowing dissent is important, to get out of such tricky situations.

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