People are basically intellectually lazy. They will believe anyone the masses listen to, just like the pied piper.
That's an evolutionary optimization.
Monkey-see-monkey-do can be pretty effective. If I just mimic the best person, then I get pretty far without having to spend any energy on thinking, I can spend that energy to grow boobs or ass or muscles instead.
In well-functioning countries that was not such a big problem. Everything broke down because the value-hierarchy is now inverted so the NPCs/sheep all copy-paste the behaviours/values of the worst people. Or maybe the sheep to non-sheep ratio got out of control. Societies withstand some amount of parasitism (sheep are parasites on thinking) but if the parasites become too many then things are gonna fuck up.
I like your analysis. I hadn't thought of it that way before. It wasn't always this way. At some point, people became passive. It became easier for people to follow. I can't get Jim Jones and his followers that drank the Kool-Aid out of my mind. To this day, I don't understand why so many people followed him and killed themselves. Today, the Jim Jones effect and the Kool-Aid still exists, but at a much larger scale. World wide. The Kool-Aid was replaced by pharmaceuticals. Mass hysteria. I've completely lost hope for humanity to survive. Yes, a few of us will. But the majority have jumped off the cliff. They just don't know it yet. Shocking.
I'm working very hard now changing my life's direction. I can no longer count on society to keep my family safe. The contract has broken. Dangerous criminals are running our governments and they're killing us, not only with pharmaceuticals, but weaponizing our food and energy. It won't surprise me if the tyrants shoot off nuclear bombs.
Godspeed.
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