Ostracization can be an effective tactic but not so much in the modern world. Remember back when it was a tiny fringe of people who would believe every conspiracy theory that came along, maybe like 3-4% of people? And if they started going off on their ideas about conspiracy theories, people would give them negative feedback and stop inviting them to places and generally not be their friends? Since people that agreed with them were few, they had a low chance of organically building up a network of people who thought like them, and they would soften their views and their actions to maintain their social relationships. In that environment, ostracization is actually an effective tool at deradicalizing people.
In the modern media and communications landscape, though, these people can find those other people with similar fringe belief and create a community anywhere in the world. They may get ostracized by their immediate social groups, but that leads them into a bubble of people like them which actually radicalizes them further.
On top of that, we have a traditional news media that is feeding people propaganda, a social media landscape that is breaking people’s brains, and instead of a fringe of 3% of people being detached from reality it’s now 10 or 15 times that number. We’ve created a world where being attached to reality or being decent to your fellow human beings is no longer required at all to maintain your social circle.
In that environment, does ostracizing the nutjobs and evil people in your social circle work? Maybe sometimes. Certainly some people would be hurt by being ostracized by their families entirely. But being a kook, believing in unreality, giving your mind over to the right wing echosphere, and making Trump your cult leader activates a lot of the same psychological prisons that being religious does, and now people challenging your evil or your lack of attachment to reality is a test of faith. And so you probably view this ostracization as a test of your faith, a chance to prove loyalty to your cult over your family, which can make the whole problem worse.
I don’t have a solution to this. I do not believe the reasonable, non-hateful people have an obligation to spend the time and emotional energy trying to win back the insane and evil people. If you try to do it, good for you, I admire that, but a lot of us just don’t have it in us anymore. I don’t think there’s a way to fix it. I think this is the new reality. Something Earth-shattering would have to happen to change the status quo.
It’s probably happening in the US worse than anywhere else for various reasons I could get into in a separate post, so one option is to flee this pile of shit for places that have less shitty, less easily manipulated people (this is my current plan), but the whole world is getting wrecked by this shit.
