re: #137 Quoth the raven, Covfefe.

The thing that gets me is, many of these marks are intelligent people. My dad was extremely competent at his job and is a brilliant engineer in his field. Why the fuck do they lose all sense when it comes to matters outside their area of expertise?

Hate.

It’s the emotional investment. They were approached by a cult that offered belonging and emotional fulfillment. It was a pretty seductive approach - just watch TV, there are some hot blondes, and people you know or kind of know keep sending similar stories over Facebook and email. Plus, every time you watched, or every email you read, you got a hit of the good stuff - you got to feel a strong emotion. Typically this was fear, or anger at those others; brown people, liberals, those guys who were ruining everything. But emotions don’t have to be positive to be addicting - the negative ones are even more so sometimes. Soon enough you had to have a hit every day, then every hour. And then you were hooked.

Now, it consumes you. Who you were before is forgotten. You belong to this tribe now, your people are the ones who think just like you, who watch the same shows, who know the same words. To hear any contradictory fact would be unthinkable. It wouldn’t just mean you were wrong - it would mean you weren’t you anymore. The tribe’s thinking is everything, it’s who you are. There is nothing else.

It’s a cult. Smart people can join cults too. I know many. They’re still human, but they can’t be reasoned with. They can only be deprogrammed or neutralised.