Leap Into Life (#29): Progressivism Was Always Fake

In our “Leap Into Life” series, we cover the collision between symbolic consensual reality and external consistent reality. As realists, we reject the “reality” formed of human tokens, emotions, peer pressure, and language.

It turns out that college students status signal religious tolerance in order to be accepted, but the higher-level students know this is fake and pursue it no further:

Students at elite universities tend to talk a good game when it comes to religious pluralism. Many of them show up on day one already saying all the right things about respecting different faiths.

Students at less selective colleges, meanwhile, do develop more pluralistic attitudes. And by their fourth year, they participate in interfaith activities, such as taking courses about different religions or joining in interfaith dialogues, just as much as anyone else.

This view turns out to be consistent with the idea that their political correctness is performative social status signaling instead of honestly-held views:

We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes.

These students were not cynical, but adaptive. In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe.

Students say what is expected of them if they want to succeed. Like the religiously-aware students, the natural elites (high scorers) probably take it with a grain of salt, while the rank and file absorb the lessons as dogma and apply them in their lives.

The rest of us got taken along for the ride by the mere exposure effect which says that whatever we see repeated we accept as actual:

The researchers found that repeated images are more likely to be believed as representing a real person, location, or an event than images seen for the first time—even when those images were entirely AI-generated. In other words, an image shared multiple times on social media is perceived as more credible, regardless of its authenticity.

“The study is based on a well-known psychological phenomenon called the ‘mere exposure effect’ which suggests that information that we encounter repeatedly is perceived as more credible. In our research, we sought to examine whether this effect also applies in the visual domain—specifically with images created using artificial intelligence algorithms.”

“This is the first study to demonstrate the mere exposure effect for images; until now, it had only been demonstrated for text. The findings raise concerns about the spread of false visual information on social media and its influence on public perception. As we like to summarize it, if until now the proverb went, ‘A lie told often enough becomes the truth.’ Our study shows that ‘an image seen often enough becomes reality.’”

When the elite students repeat the dogma, the lower students amplify it, and then the herd watching assumes that this is the new normal and acts on it, which creates a perfect feedback loop for taking over society with insincerity that is invisible to others.