Why people adopt crazy worldviews, and how to deradicalize

How people get crazy worldviews: 1. person has a major experience they can't make sense of in any sane worldview available to them 2. crazy worldview is helpfully like "hey look here's how it makes sense"

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Feb 20, 2024

every obvious thing your worldview denies—or even treats as too obvious to bother acknowledging—is a gift you hand to crazy worldviews willing to acknowledge them

Feb 20, 2024

this, helpfully, implies much about how to deradicalize people and cultures: • develop sane worldviews that can welcome & make sense of a wider variety of experiences • when you have a relatively sane worldview, publicly acknowledge obvious things

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Jun 22, 2023

if saying obvious things is outlawed only outlaws will say obvious things & then non-outlaws will look dumb

aha I felt like someone else had articulated this before! (thanks @AbstractFairy)

QC @QiaochuYuan · Aug 26, 2019

everything that a mainstream ideology lies about / refuses to see / keeps in its shadow is a weapon that it hands to any fringe ideology that is willing to step up and claim it, and the internet makes this process faster and more visible than perhaps it has ever been

@AbstractFairy this is a pretty good example of someone (rootsmetals on instagram) acknowledging multiple obvious things in the same paragraph: (I don't necessarily agree with all of the frames she's using per se, but it's progress over a worldview that acknowledges only one of these things)