I don’t usually write about myself, because I’m interested in issues rather than personalities. Some commenters - not speaking of you, James - frequently try to derail conversations by launching personal attacks, and the best response is to ignore these and concentrate on the topic at hand.
In this case, however, I can make an exception because the topic is me. It’s good to be recognised, even in a tongue-in-cheek way. Not just because it amuses me or inflates my ego, but because it means my message is being heard.
Of course, I don’t expect James to suddenly renounce the errors of his ways and become a born-again conservative, but then that isn’t my purpose.
Fifty years ago Solomon Asch carried out a series of psychological experiments on the topic of group conformity.
In brief, he found that if all members of a group, bar one, agreed on something, then the last member of the group would also believe it - even against the plainly visible evidence.
On a larger scale, we can see the dominant media and ideologies of our society as agents of this kind of conformity.
An interesting discovery in the Asch experiments was the effect of the lone dissenting voice.
Even if only one other person stated the truth, the last person became much harder to convince. And that’s why it’s important to have a dissenting voice; it helps prevent the stifling unanimity that leads to so many bad results for a society.
With my own background as a left-wing activist, I’ve been familiar with ideologies such as identity politics, multiculturalism, feminism and the rest for many years. I know them inside and out, and I know where their blind spots lead to harmful groupthink.
I also know how to strike a nerve, so to speak, and briefly expose the cognitive dissonance behind so much of ‘progressive’ thought. The reactions I get to even one or two sentences show me when I’m on target.
So, there you have it, my Evil Plan. Well, not quite all of it - but then, what fun would it be to know all the answers in advance?
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