Have you noticed the social contagion destroying our private lives? Consider these toxic but all-too-common scenarios:
A 19-year-old college student comes home and trashes her parents for their “whiteness.”
A 33-year-old son tells his mother, “You’re dead to me,” because she supports the U.S. Constitution with its guarantee of free speech.
A Black Lives Matter (BLM) activist tells readers of his New York Times editorial that they must prove their support by disowning any loved one who doesn’t actively or financially support BLM.
Why would otherwise normal people act this way? I think such behavior can be traced to fear of being socially rejected by members of a reference group who signal what to say, how to act, whom to hate, and what to think. The fear is coupled with a strong need for acceptance by those peers.
But who informs those peers? The individuals in such groups aren’t really evil. Rather, they’ve been conditioned and nudged along by massive propaganda narratives. Social contagion spreads as people are “canceled” for disagreeing with the narrative. Under such conditions, more people become misguided, ignorant, and manipulated by institutions overrun with elites who are convinced they know best.
The technical term for tyrants who seek to break bonds of kinship is predatory alienation. The attack on free speech through the censorship-industrial complex today speeds up that alienation, feeding an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation. It also serves our fear of social isolation, which causes a vicious cycle of mean-spirited interactions like the
