> David shoves her to the ground, and Laurie begins crying her journalist crocodile tears.
Sorry, no. This would be a stronger essay if you were capable of admitting that getting violent with people who write editorials you dislike is actually indefensible. If you can't make a distinction between violence and sitting up straight or coming prepared to class, you no longer plausibly seem like a mere civic nationalist, and the charge of fascism ceases to ring hollow.
It would have been better to point out that this is Evidence From Fiction, and that there is no actual reason to suspect a slippery slope from being a good student to being a thug - that this is a contrived plot device by the writer.
Thank you very much for this review! Somebody in some online comment section far, far away once recommended "The Wave", so I watched it. It left me baffled, for much the reasons you give; this "true story" seemed utterly psychologically implausible, with sitting up straight becoming some kind of gateway drug to fascism. Being implausible, it failed to answer the question that it set out to answer, and it's an important question. Having seen what happened to society in the COVID era, it seems to me that the Asch, Milgram and Begue (Milgram-like https://psychologyrocks.org/begue-et-al-2014/) experiments got closer to an answer. Begue suggested that Big 5 personality traits agreeableness and conscienciousness could become toxic under certain circumstances, and Milton Mayer says something similar in "They Thought They Were Free". Basically most people are not sufficiently situationally aware to realize when they're being manipulated, and when that happens, the problem is that they think they're the good guys... when they're not.
Magisterial
> David shoves her to the ground, and Laurie begins crying her journalist crocodile tears.
Sorry, no. This would be a stronger essay if you were capable of admitting that getting violent with people who write editorials you dislike is actually indefensible. If you can't make a distinction between violence and sitting up straight or coming prepared to class, you no longer plausibly seem like a mere civic nationalist, and the charge of fascism ceases to ring hollow.
It would have been better to point out that this is Evidence From Fiction, and that there is no actual reason to suspect a slippery slope from being a good student to being a thug - that this is a contrived plot device by the writer.
Thank you very much for this review! Somebody in some online comment section far, far away once recommended "The Wave", so I watched it. It left me baffled, for much the reasons you give; this "true story" seemed utterly psychologically implausible, with sitting up straight becoming some kind of gateway drug to fascism. Being implausible, it failed to answer the question that it set out to answer, and it's an important question. Having seen what happened to society in the COVID era, it seems to me that the Asch, Milgram and Begue (Milgram-like https://psychologyrocks.org/begue-et-al-2014/) experiments got closer to an answer. Begue suggested that Big 5 personality traits agreeableness and conscienciousness could become toxic under certain circumstances, and Milton Mayer says something similar in "They Thought They Were Free". Basically most people are not sufficiently situationally aware to realize when they're being manipulated, and when that happens, the problem is that they think they're the good guys... when they're not.