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Comment by verisimi | Hacker News Reader

I agree with a lot of what you said - that individuality is what drives us forward. But, in my view, acceptance of individuals and their damn unpopular opinions is exactly what is under attack.

The last 2 or 3 years were not a great time for the individual. The 'community' was stampeding, morality and freedom of choice went out of the window, and it didn't matter who got hurt. Everyone needed to do what they were told.

So, what I'm hearing is 'fine words' but these seem to go out of the window, when the s** appears to hit the fan.

Ultimately - this is a question of authority. Are you your own authority, or do experts (political, judicial, scientific, etc) tell you what to do?

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> The last 2 or 3 years were not a great time for the individual. The 'community' was stampeding, morality and freedom of choice went out of the window, and it didn't matter who got hurt. Everyone needed to do what they were told.

If you think the last few years were bad for individualism, see the Salem witch trials or McCarthyism. We used to punish people with unpopular opinions by literally burning them at the stake at worst and ruining their livelihoods at best. Before that we had excommunication from the Church which was cancel culture on hypersteroids.

Nonconformity to the cultural zeitgeist is more acceptable now than it has ever been.

You don't have to go back that far, just try being gay prior to the 00s (or in many parts of the world today), or trans today.

You'll see very quickly how the desire of the community to not think icky thoughts will happily run roughshod over the individual. Hell, SCOTUS recently signaled that it's looking to do just that.

> Nonconformity to the cultural zeitgeist is more acceptable now than it has ever been.

Until covid it looked to be true yet they reached to the same tools without a second thought

But it is true in that it turns around more quickly - it only took two years to understand the absurdity of COVID measures from mandatory masking to indoor lockdowns and vaccine passports - in the past that would have taken 50 years

so yes we are in a much better place

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