What history teaches us about people and freedom.

What I had to realise is that most people obviously prefer to be on the side of the majority than to be right.
Most people obviously prefer security and protection to freedom and self-determination if you make them comfortable enough, if you provide them with enough wealth, money, entertainment or other luxuries. If you bribe them with that, they will nod off to anything! Once the inertia of the masses has set in, it is difficult to bring them back to the old normality.

The human emotion that surpasses the fear of death is the fear of social exclusion. If they have been made sufficiently afraid, most people not only accept authoritarianism, they even demand it. Quite obviously, a significant proportion of the world's populations have illiberal to totalitarian tendencies that come to the fore under the right conditions. Modern man is not vigilant enough when it comes to defending his own freedoms against state encroachment, while propaganda is just as effective today as it was a hundred years ago. The lessons of history have not made us any less susceptible to this (keyword: pandemic of the unvaccinated, stigmatisation of groups of people).

Everything can be politicised by the media, the government and those who trust them. Science can be politicised, social media, churches, schools, morality, everything. Now science has become a kind of substitute religion, complete with ritualistic cult acts, for millions of people in the tendentially atheistic West. This biased "science" (...) guided by ideology and desires has little to do with real science itself, but at least it proves that it is easier to fool a person than to convince him that he has been fooled.

Most people would rather just look like they are in solidarity, they would rather look like they are in solidarity without really wanting to be in solidarity. People, on the other hand, who are pushed out of the discourse with invective like "conspiracy theorist" are often simply months ahead of the mainstream narrative.
Most people believe that the government is acting in the best interests of the people. Even those who are actually vocal critics of their government believe this and are easily programmed by media brainwashing and propaganda to behave in ways that would have been unthinkable to them in the past.

Once they have made up their minds, most people would rather stay wrong than admit they were wrong. Given this fact, one has to admit that Stanley Milgram is right about his experiment, i.e. that most people love prohibitions, prefer to be led, enjoy the deprivation of freedom and, in the right situation (especially as part of a majority), are willing to make decisions that directly contradict their conscience, their convictions as individuals.

People can be trained and conditioned quickly and relatively easily to change their behaviour significantly, for better or worse.
Most people are empathic, which is good! They have good intentions, but most people have great difficulty understanding precisely because of this that some people can have selfish, or actually malicious intentions, and that is bad.

Before we unreservedly believe everything from politics and the mainstream media, we should also use other sources, carefully evaluate what is really happening around us, who we want to believe and, above all, what kind of people we want to have been in such a situation when we later tell our children and grandchildren about that time and the role we played in it.