this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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It is because radicalization is more than a cognitive process. It is as much social and psychological. Intelligence alone is a pretty bad predictor of a lot of things we like to think only depend on intelligence. While there is some causation, it is not a vacuum or often even the biggest predictor of many things.
Radicalization is the thing that makes you believe in things that can't be real. Making people believe a lot of things is surprisingly easy. Look into religions. While I don't believe and you might not, a lot of intelligent people throughout world history have. There might be a correlation between intelligence and atheism these days, but the effect is far from linear.
I would then argue that you're disassociating emotional intelligence with total intelligence. If someone is emotionally unintelligent enough to be swayed by baseless rhetoric then they aren't an intelligent person being manipulated they are an emotionally compromised person being manipulated.
They definitely are emotionally compromised person being manipulated but being emotionally unintelligent and being emotionally compromised are not the same thing. While being emotionally unintelligent will affect your risk of being radicalized it does so through your own emotions and capacity to process them in a healthy way.
Radicalization happens in steps. You don't get from being blind to racism and as the next step participating in genocide. Nor do you go from wondering if you are being lied to for some nefarious reason to believing 5G will kill you. It is a slow and gradual process. A lot of people are following the same playbook. It includes things like moving goalposts, giving the same legitimacy to two viewpoints that are not equal in ethics or evidence, playing on fear and discomfort, and giving convenient fall guy for people's difficulties. In my language, there is a saying that in a group stupidity condenses. That isn't because people's intelligence somehow lessens but because of the social nature of human beings.
It is not like people in Nazi Germany suddenly lose their collective cognitive or emotional intelligence in 20s and 30s. There were pretty clear issues going on that could be seized for populist politics. It is also not like Nazis themselves didn't have a huge amount of anti-intellectual pseudoscience in their idealogy and, in the case of some members, a lot of occultism going around.
The hard truth is that people in general are really bad at seeing manipulation. You can see the clumsy attempts but the majority of people judge others' actions based on their view of their intentions. And as in general we would like to think of ourselves as well-intentioned, we are not judging if someone is manipulating all the time. Critical thinking can help but the thing about radicalization is that it speaks to multiple psychological tendencies we naturally have.
And while I deem QAnon shit and even any flavor of alt-right or religious fundamentalism idiocy, the pure fact that they have been as successful as they have tells that their manipulation is quite finessed.
Stupid is as stupid does.