“think for yourself” as a piece of advice is discriminatory against people who aren’t good at thinking, which is nearly everyone, including and especially me

thinking should be a team sport, which is unfortunately exactly the opposite of the way thinking is introduced in school: as a way to impress your teachers and outcompete your classmates

obviously we all depend constantly on each other’s thoughts, stretching back to the beginning of writing. nobody has ever thought for themselves. it’s impossible to be isolated from other people’s thoughts, even if those people have been dead for centuries

the problem with cults is not that people have “stopped thinking for themselves,” as if that were something they would otherwise be doing. it’s that people are trusting some person or idea which is not actually trustworthy, and which is *unusual* to be trusting in that way

when you trust something which is not actually trustworthy, but which everyone also trusts, we don’t call that “living in a cult,” we just call that “being a well-adjusted member of society.” being in a cult is exactly like this, except that “everyone” is a smaller group

can’t believe ndt mansged to get a rant out of me. of all people. i really was trying not to have opinions on twitter anymore

society be like “why are you in the small cult, way over there? shouldn’t you be in the big cult, over here, with the rest of us? where it’s safe? we have caaapitalism”

in the small cult you might give all your money to some guy who kinda looks like jesus or commit mass suicide in guyana

but in the big cult you’ll get a *job*

and maybe if you’re lucky one day you’ll get to *retire*

*after* giving up your health and youth

it’s not that the big cult won’t hurt you. it’s just that the ways the big cult will hurt you are normalized. small cults are also exactly like this. the ways you get hurt get normalized. and you find a reason to pretend they don’t matter