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Why Are You Hitting Yourself?
ByMatt Steinglass on the psychology of dictatorial bullies:
When you make people accept a plausible fiction, you’re just winning
that one issue. But when you make them accept a lie which everyone
knows is a lie, you’re destroying their integrity, destroying their
will to describe the world as they see it, rather than as you tell them
it is. It’s the bully on the playground holding the weaker kid’s arm
and slapping his cheek with it, saying “Why are you hitting yourself?”
Like Vaclav Havel’s grocer hanging “Workers of the world, unite!” in
his shop window, once a person has acquiesced to something they do not
believe, and which everyone knows they do not believe, they become
complicit in their own oppression.
