Michael Lipkin
1 min readJan 16, 2022

You are in your own rabbit hole of believing in human 'reason' and the inoculation metaphor.

Humans have never used reason outside of a tiny minority and then only when they are involved in certain activities (maths, science).

Humans are social animals and beliefs are used as in-group membership signalling.

Sure, you can inoculate someone against, say, Qanon by placing them in a group of people they want to join (e.g. the group offers something such as friendship, other good-life aspects etc) and within that group they talk down Qanon ideas.

The social context is everything.

Your view of humans as hyper individualistic, rational operators is just completely and obviously wrong.

You are in a rabbit hole.

Progress consist not of increasing fealty to rationality but the fumbling together of improved myths that bind together increasingly large groups of people while also unleashing human creativity.

The myths you are adhering to have reached the end of their usefulness.

This end was undoubtedly hastened by the American 'unipolar moment' after the fall of the Soviet Union when the US attempted to promote liberal democracy at the barrel of a gun.

So well done you rational-hyper-individualistic-human mythers - you have destroyed your thing.

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What makes you think I am "hyper-individualistic"? Is there a passage in this essay that commits me to individualism? If so, you don't point to it, or present a scintilla of evidence. If you read my book, you'll see that I present human beings as…

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