Post more, I would like to hear your thinking on this subject.
There are definitely groups out there that fight to impose their views. Some are formal groups with a leadership and an agenda, other are more ad-hoc. They do it for different reasons (some will do it for personal gains, other will do it because they're convinced it's better), and even inside these groups you can find different motivations.
This is to be expected, despite everything we're still living in societies where you can't get anything done if your population doesn't consent at least a bit, and where you can't get any drastic change without at least some popular support. Note that when I write "drastic change", I mean deviation from the status-quo. So obviously, groups that benefit from the status quo not only benefit from spreading their ideology, but they also benefit from just disrupting other discourses.
Some of the views that all these groups are trying to impose can be "scientifically" argued. This doesn't mean that the answer is clear-cut: even in natural science, most of the things are true until they're proven to be false. So even in good faith, you could expect a lot of dissensions on these questions. And since there's potentially a lot to gain, most won't stick to good faith. This makes it hard to get the "truth", but I don't think it means that you can't believe anything. Just like in any science field, there are some solid references that you can assume to be correct until something better is found.
Some of the views are less grounded in facts but are more a matter of ideology, or personal preferences. Most of the human rights don't have any scientific proofs behind them. They're just things that we decide to agree on because we think it's better this way. This is why it's sometimes difficult to debate them, and also why we feel strongly about them (the less facts you have to back up a concept, the more belief in it you need to keep it).
So back to the topic, the people cited as linked to the Manhattan Institute have a discourse that:
- Will generally go against the flow of scientific consensus (climate change denial, denial of studies proving systemic racism, etc.)
- Spread mistrust, masquerading it as "reasonable doubt", leaving you with absolutely nothing to rely on (except their words)
- Reject any voice that challenge the status-quo.
So you might feel like you're anti-authoritarian when you follow these people who reject the "mainstream opinion" but when that mainstream opinion goes against the status-quo (like it does with climate change or Marxism, since even if they're being talked about a lot no major government is actively doing anything on these topics), you might actually do what the authorities want you to do.
www.thesun.co.uk
