Mollie Hemingway

And it's weird to see that someone who was a participant in this could...

so easily see the downsides of it.

I had not thought about this at all, and I love this.

Like, you think about what's happening in the left in America, right?

They really love the revolution that they accomplished in the 1960s, and they want to have it keep happening and happening and happening.

Like, there will never be an end.

No.

Because they have a hunger to have that feeling that they or their parents had in the 1960s.

So, you're telling us that you would not have supported the American Revolution.

So one of the things that I think is great about reading this book is to think about it less in terms of completely totalitarian government systems and more about how we inoculate our own minds against groupthink and mob hysteria.

And so there is value in thinking through when everyone is freaking out about a given movement or a certain approach, a way of thinking, of making sure you're protecting your own ability to rebel against that groupthink.

And we live in such a system.

I mean, we love to think of America as being such a free country, and in many ways it is, but we can still get carried away by these post-totalitarian waves of hysteria where everybody says you have to think about things a certain way.

You have to train your mind to resist that and not get bullied into agreeing with what everybody else says.

I think of this also in association with Václav Havel's Greengrocer essay, The Power of the Powerless.

And he says in that that it's not just communist systems.

It's not just overtly totalitarian systems where you might be pressured into conformity that is not good for you or for your neighbors.

And so we have to think about that too, about how we resist, and it's something you have to practice.

Or even more simply, there was a period of time where social media would launch these campaigns where you were supposed to show solidarity with other people.

The square.