2 Comments

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.

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