Why won’t people leave communities of poorly informed dissatisfaction?
It is a curious and potentially intractable aspect of human psychology that the more untenable an ideological position, belief system or existential context, the harder it becomes to leave. Doubling down on a bad bet takes less energy than the potential effort required to extract one’s self from a bad situation. It is at this level a form of behavioural physics – a principle of least psychological and ideational action that leads quite easily (and perhaps, more often) to many so easily and willfully becoming entangled in the “local minima” of a much vaster information terrain.
Corollary to, and following quite naturally from, this is that absurdities and fictional systems of belief provide precisely the most seductive simplicities in which an individual or group might figuratively clothe themselves as identity. We might imagine a latent space in which the simplest concepts (as narrative) persist for as long as they do, along with their more sophisticated cousins, because they are resilient to an accelerating change and uncertainty that their existence is in part a defensive psychological bastion against.
Narratives of language, cognition and ideation are always to some extent fictional. The suspension of disbelief is difficult.
Daedelus Kite 