Societal Stockholm syndrome
- Embracing social servitude
Nature
In the 1970s, a strange psychological phenomenon was identified: in traumatic abduction situations, a certain percentage of the population is prone to falling in love with their abductors. But if we are living in a societal prison of the mind, then are there those who have fallen in love with their mental jailers?
Claim
...the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude... (Aldous Huxley).
This ability to get the public on board with policies and practices that are self-evidently against their own interest is not just surprising. This is a type of "magic trick". I mean this in two key senses. Firstly, the would-be social engineers' ability to reliably martial support for ideas and actions that would have been dismissed as lunacy mere moments before is, at first glance, so incredible as to be magical. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, this magic, like all such sleight-of-hand, is, at bottom, precisely that: a trick.