When Having Friends Is More Alluring Than Being Right

> considering men have dominated every aspect of society

Some men. And a minority of them.

Sounds like he's the type of person who thinks getting upvotes from his fellow redditors is more alluring than being right. Thank you for confirming that there is no reason to click this link.

This goes way beyond flat earth and the other beliefs he listed. People will laugh at you if you claim that rocks grow out of dead birds, but almost no-one really convinced themselves of where rocks come from or where dead birds go and that it's not the same place. We trust authorities but we don't think it through or investigate it for ourselves. It's much easier to trust authorities because that's what everyone else is trusting too so you get automatic agreement and friends without having to think for yourself. We also have no idea that the Earth isn't flat except from trust in authorities.

What is kind of strange is that even though some wrong beliefs are mocked by people who don't agree (eg flat-earth, Scientology), others are put on a kind of pedestal of respect, such as Islam and native rituals. The justification I can think of is "Let those poor savages have their special beliefs because they're weaker than us and maybe that's all they have to cling onto so we shouldn't hold them to the same high standards that we hold ourselves to." Scientologists and Christians are part of us and have no excuse for being "wrong" so we're more openly critical of them.

It's not a wicked problem. It takes very little effort to research and conclude that the empirically established standard of medical care for transgender people is to allow them to transition and allow them to integrate into society as the gender they tell you they are. It takes very little effort to discover that gender has not been and is not a binary in every single human culture, either.

They are different. For a different reason. Flat earthers don't hurt people by having a very wrong belief. TERFs want to deny transgender people their basic human rights and largely succeeded for a great long time. That's injustice.

I lost my dad to this. So far, nothing helps. I have no idea what the solution is. It only works when THEY want out.

But why would they?

We're brutally, brutally mean to people like this.

Every time somebody dunks on a flat earther or their ilk, puts somebody down to defend the superiority of their own worldview, they've added a brick to the wall that keeps these people from feeling like they can rejoin society.

The first time they pop out of the cave, feeble amateurs in the world of normies, they slip up just a tiny bit and get their head bitten off. There is nobody there to to say "if you tried, we'd have you". For most of us, it isn't true.

It seems like few people realize that this is part of the residue we unwittingly leave on the world. That the cost of performative intellectual superiority, even if you're actually right, is the burning of rungs on their ladder back up.

Needlessly dunking on misguided people worsens a world that we ourselves are stuck with.

Be nice.