It would be wrong to see this as just a prudish or Victorian or even sincerely religious attitude about sex. It’s about control. It’s about the authority of the state intruding into more and more parts of life, and about making more and more people complicit in the abuse of power.
/1
/2 The Nazis’ increasingly all-encompassing laws didn’t just serve policy goals. They served to normalize the idea of the state having authority in every segment of life, and to make more and more people complicit in enforcing that authority. That’s what totalitarianism means.
/3 The Nazis passed anti-Jewish laws that forced more and more people to be complicit in enforcement and part of the machine excluding, shunning, and abusing Jews. The American Right wants abortion laws, IVF laws, contraceptive laws that will make more and more doctors, nurses, etc. complicit.
/4 The fundamental concept is that most people, rather than stand up and say “I’m a terrible person if I go along with this,” will go along and rewrite their mental map to agree with it rather than think themselves terrible.
/5 The anti-trans movement illustrates this. They KNOW there are very few trans kids, but they want to make as many people as possible — coaches, teachers, administrators — complicit in policing and excluding them. Same with the push for censorship of books.
Lots. There are likely 1000s of psychology books written about Cognitive Dissidence, illusory Truth effect, Dunning Kruger. What there isn't is a way to predict or stop it from happening. Humans are fallible to psychological weaknesses.
I’m more interested in this kind of strategy where average people become implicated in these reactionary policies and the implication becomes a way of disseminating culpability for any harm.
The study of just those 3 effects alone explains a lot of that. There's more to it of course but the human psyche and it's flaws are the basis of most of it.
