indoctrination and how it works

This is a slightly expanded version of a comment I left elsewhere, the subject being whether things like Wokeism and Social Justice are organic beliefs that have developed or whether they’re purely the results of indoctrination.

In my view indoctrination works much much more effectively if you’re trying to indoctrinate people into something that is at least roughly consistent with what they already believe. It works better if people are already to some extent receptive to the idea with which you’re trying to indoctrinate them.

Wokeism and Social Justice have been so successful because people already believed that equality, fairness, justice and tolerance were good things. Americans in particular already believed in the whole “all men are created equal” thing. They already believed that racial equality was a worthwhile goal. It wasn’t difficult to convince people that racial equality was being thwarted by dark sinister forces like institutional racism, or that racial equality was being thwarted by bad people.

It wasn’t difficult to persuade people to accept homosexual marriage because they already believed in tolerance for homosexuals. Homosexual marriage could be sold as a logical extension of that.

Even the trans thing wasn’t really all that hard since people were already receptive to the idea that “everyone should be free to be whatever they want to be.” It was in some ways the liberal belief in autonomy taken to an extreme, but the belief that autonomy is a good thing was already well established.

On the other hand it would be vastly more difficult to indoctrinate people into beliefs that are inconsistent with what they already believe. If you tried to persuade people that the vote should be taken away from women, or that fornication should be a criminal offence (and I’ve encountered dissident rightists who push those very ideas) you’d be taking on an immensely difficult task. In the former case you’d be swimming against a tide that has been running in the direction of female equality for a couple of centuries.

You can sell an idea that is just outside the limits of the current Overton Window but it’s very difficult to sell an idea that is miles and miles outside the current Overton Window.