I must confess that I am finding it difficult to muster sympathy for them. And this coming from a man that despises Musk's behaviour, and wished he had been barred from buying Twitter. My reason being that during the pandemic, I repeatedly told people that my biggest fear was not the virus, but the economic collapse that would be the inevitable result of global lockdowns, and the authoritarian dystopia being shaped by the censorship of contrarian views. "First you are working from home, and then you are just... at home.", I said. And people who tried to share that view on Twitter where harassed and banned. Perhaps I will be proven wrong, and the economy will quickly rebound, who knows. But being gagged from even discussing the possibility of the events we now see unfolding, has left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
Watching twitter ban dissenting doctors and scientists reminded me of Hannah Arendt and the Eichman trial: "The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution"
And this from a NYT movie review:
"Arendt concluded that evil in the modern world is done neither by monsters nor by bureaucrats, but by joiners. That evil, Arendt argued, originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning Eichmann finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to do anything and sacrifice everything. Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement."