Leftism crystallizes the need for social connection among those who cannot accept traditional ways, such as nationalism, or religion. As a principle form of social belonging, it becomes vitally important in and of itself. The ideas are not what matter, but their uniformity: their reliable uniformity among otherwise differing groups.
This is the main reason that such stupidity endures. Certainly, it is reinforced by cynical psychopaths. But they are tapping into a latent psychological need, one which is expanded greatly by continual attacks on all other potential sources of belonging.
The human race is in an odd place. It is quite true that tribalisms of various sorts can and often have led to violence. But the problem has not been solved. Leftism is more violent than most traditional forms of tribalism. It didn’t fix anything, and made many things worse.
I was sitting in a bar yesterday, pondering trauma, pondering the need to fight, to attack, to interact with others through aggression, and I saw armies forming. That is where people always went: to war. You start with a need to connect through violence, and then you find a reason, and you say the reason created the violence, when it was the other way around.
Self evidently, I am no pacifist, and not willing to say violence is never justified, or that we do not need our soldiers. But I do think it worth recognizing on a macro level how these things work.
And on a related, but very tangential note, I was pondering an episode in Fallout 3. You get locked into a Virtual Reality device, which mimics a typical American suburb, with psychotically happy music playing continually, and everyone nice, except for this mean little girl in the middle playground, on a street with houses on all sides. You tell her you want out, and she starts giving you tasks. The first task is to make a kid cry. They give you speech options, and the most obvious one is to tell him that his parents are getting divorced and it is his fault.
This was to me what I might call a Milgram moment. What reaction could and should a normal person have? It is “only” a video game, but as David Grossman pointed out, such games can and do teach real behaviors. I balked. I got on the walk through, and found out there was an alternative way out. What I read was that after you bully little Billy, or whatever his name was, you have to kill each of the adults in the space, none of whom are mean or aggressive in any way. You then find out the little girl is really a German scientist who finds sadism amusing, you find your father, who was a dog, and the game progresses.
Here is the thing: most of these games are on the internet. It would be a simple task to build an algorithm to gather data on the decision patterns of the kids (and adults like me) playing these games. You could build a good psychological template for their suitability as little Nazis,. or their willingness to submit to tyranny, and do so across large populations, as meta-data.
It is of course impossible for people on the outside to know what decisions are being made by who and why; to know who is planning what. But I do think it worth fearing extremely wealthy people pursuing radical agendas.