Have We Indoctrinated Ourselves?

The first time you hear something vile or weird, you recoil. Then you hear it again, maybe reworded. And again & again & again. You’ve heard it enough now, so you shrug it off, you start to normalize it in your own mind. You stop thinking it’s vile and weird. Eventually you internalize it, you completely forget that you once thought it was wrong. After enough of this (and everyone’s threshold varies of course), a dangerous narrative has taken root in your subconscious. You’ve been worn down with repetition until your critical thinking and your moral sense lie in dormant submission, beaten to a pulp. Welcome to 2025.

It seems that we find ourselves in an era no longer offering the comfort of straightforward success.

In the recent past, a house, stable career and modest savings used to be within reach for most people, but the middle class continues to shrink as everything gets more expensive. At least in the country I live in.

The wealth gap has more than doubled since the 1980s. Around two-thirds of us live paycheck to paycheck. This pressure isn’t random. It’s maintained by the world we’ve built, a world that I think is drifting toward zero-sum greed.

Our (global) culture increasingly normalizes hyper-competition and shamelessness. There’s a celebration of winning at all costs, across every domain…even in the non-profit world, shockingly.

We see public figures openly lying & hoarding & insulting others to maintain power. It’s like we’re starting to come to the conclusion, collectively, that being considerate of others simply isn’t practical.

We still value empathy as an abstract idea, but on the ground, in the “real” world (and the digital world), I think we are letting disregard for the greater good seep into our daily lives.

Consider for a moment how easily misinformation spreads. There are industrialized & commoditized information pipelines. They work through repeated, constant exposure to some set of biased ideas. This tactic is not new, but the sheer prevalence and inescapability of it is. And everyone is participating.

We end up dividing ourselves into in-groups and out-groups. We haphazardly toss entire sets of people into the bad category because it’s easier to blame them for our problems than it is for us to look at ourselves. It’s easier to blame than it is to take accountability for what we have allowed, and continue to allow, to happen all around us. It’s easier to blame than it is to stop consuming and engaging.

We rationalize that since we belong to some right group, the blaming is justified. Over time, we simply become numb. Our empathy atrophies, and we start believing whatever we’ve been fed (whatever we’ve willingly eaten).

The speed at which this happens has exploded with the internet, then social media, now AI, and it is truly bonkers. In the 20th century, we might find propagandist messaging in a few local publications or radio broadcasts. Now, we face a 24/7 barrage of curated messages pushing us to the extremes of belief, and we happily gobble it up, more so than any generation before us. There’s a reason it’s called a feed.

We CAN break this cycle. Humans have done it before, many times. We don’t have to stay numb. The moment we choose to step away from the constant stream — cancel some subscriptions, unfollow some pages, talk face-to-face with people who have real concerns rather than regurgitated talking points — we start to reawaken our sense of reason and empathy.

Taking your face away from the feed also helps restore your ability to question and to sense contradictions. You’re not innately hateful or mindless, I assure you. The sense of right and wrong is inside of you, waiting for a chance to reassert itself.

We will ONLY succeed with empathy and patience. We can’t just hurl criticisms at each other or call each other stupid. It doesn’t work.

People tend to cling to whatever beliefs they’ve been saturated with, and direct attacks on those beliefs trigger them to become immediately defensive. We can still disagree passionately, but if we switch to raw hostility, we close ourselves off from one another. No mind changes when it’s cornered in a cage.

We CAN make real progress by finding shared values — like actual shared ones, not the convenient labels we assign to each other for our virtue signaling.

We need to reference something that is truly common ground (granted the common ground is shrinking). Something like community ethics or the basics of decency we learned as kids. Then we try to casually point out that certain statements or actions run counter to those shared values. We let the contradiction hang. Let it sit in the other person’s mind overnight. We don’t push them to concede in real time. We let them walk away with those lingering thoughts, so their own critical sense reawakens. It ain’t easy, and it won’t work most of the time, but at least we can try.

We also have to watch out for the ways we keep ourselves locked in echo chambers, whether it’s political or ideological. Turning every disagreement into an existential war kills real dialogue.

Final Musings

I rarely use the word should. But I believe we should approach each conversation with the goal of reactivating critical thinking — our own included. We might not see an immediate light bulb moment, but seeds of doubt or curiosity can sprout days or weeks later.

Voice conversations or in-person chats can help. Reading vocal inflections and body language helps us remember we’re talking to a real person. The flicker of humanity can be enough to nudge empathy.

NONE of this is a quick fix. We’re all under layers of learned habits and half-truths. But we owe it to ourselves to try.

At the end of the day, you’re not powerless. Your moral compass and critical thinking skills are still there, no matter how cluttered your feed has gotten. It’s a matter of stepping back for a moment, telling yourself, “Wait, does this actually line up with what I believe?”

You can do that for yourself, and we can gently encourage each other to do the same. We must work together if we want to dismantle the negativity and cynicism that’s quietly been engineered into our everyday narratives. We can break free of our indoctrination — if we want.