Politics, making bad choices with votes, is mainly what I have in mind…but it’s not limited to that. You see it with anything that requires a choice and a commitment of money, time, effort, etc. By and large people don’t want to admit I made a bad choice and it’s time to cut my losses.
Instead there is lots of rationalizing going on, and I think this leads people down paths they otherwise would not have gone, rinse repeat as things worsen. Small concessions to negative consequences build over time, and along the way the initial bad choices may be forgotten. Plenty of people can be swimming in the messes they made without ever a thought of changing their views.
It never helps to point out the degree to which a person has compromised themselves. That has to be done from within, and that’s exactly what is missing.
I think all of this is a huge problem in the world today. But damned if I know what to do about it.
Always have been a problem. It was just a lot less consumerist-focused in the past.
I just read a text from Pascal that he wrote somewhere in the year 1656 and in which he was discussing how a bunch of people from the Sorbonne university (they were not your average angry lynching mob, they were scholars) were asking for another one to be severely punished for something he had said in favor of some text they deemed heretic (which was no joke, back then). Pascal then explains they refused to change their mind when they were faced first with the fact that all the guy said was that he could not find any occurence of that heresy in said text (they even refused to read the text to see by themselves when he proposed to do so); and then when they were told that this dude they wanted so badly to punishe (for something he did not say) was indeed agreeing with them on the condemnation of that heresy only refusing to blame it on that specific author since he never wrote that. Their reply? He still deserved to be punished because of his attitude. I have grossly over-simplified the thing but that is indeed the core idea: they did not like the dude and his tone and wanted to make him pay for that, they openly said fuck it to any fact demonstrating them wrong. And those people were scholars.
This happened some 370 years ago but it could be happening at this very moment in (too) many universities—one would just need to replace ‘heresy’ with any of the ‘sensitive’ topics we consider so much more important nowadays.
And I have little doubt it will keep on happening under a variety of guises. Probably even much more frequently, seeing the world-wide rise of proud idiocracies, and their proud idiot leaders, and the rise of all those communitarisms that that thrive on hating on one another, almost everywhere.
Edit: typos and a few minor changes.
Heresy in the 17th century actually wasn’t as big a deal as it was in the past. This was a couple centuries after the Protestant Reformation shattered the Catholic hold on Europe, leading to decades of war in which millions died, eventually resulting in the shitloads-of-denominations we see today, where almost all of them are “heretics” of some sort to all the other ones. I mean, modern day Mormonism isn’t really even a monotheistic religion anymore. This all has its roots in the breaking of Catholic domination back in the early 1500s.