How can you know you’re being exploited if you belong to a system that keeps you from asking deep questions—a system designed to prevent you from knowing you are in one? When naive trust, blind faith, and uncritical acceptance are all that’s expected of you, how do you even begin to see clearly?
While catching up with my reading backlogs, I came across something that felt uncomfortably familiar, from a blog post titled “Why Cynicism is Just Moral Cowardice: When Did Belief Became Cringe?”:
Naive trust leads to exploitation, blind faith leads to cults, and uncritical acceptance leads to bad decisions.
I found myself reading it again and again.
Naive trust leads to exploitation. Blind faith leads to cults. Uncritical acceptance leads to bad decisions.
And people use these three things to keep you compliant to the system, embodying the us vs. them mindset, which constantly divides those inside the fold from the ones outside it. What’s even crueler is how the system doesn’t have to force these three things on you. The system and its believers just has to convince you that they are virtues. Question them and you become the enemy.
Oh how difficult it is to see you are trapped if you are inside looking in. Even if other people would tell you something stinks inside, your mind struggles to process it. You’ve already been desensitized, conditioned by a system that disguises the lack of transparency, justice, and fairness as virtues. How would you even know?
In private, they say, ‘Never ask questions.’ In public, they call it trust. They call it faith. They call it acceptance.
You have to get outside to see what’s holding you in.
But how do you escape a cage you’ve been taught to call home?
jessa 