For many young men, expressing a transgressive opinion is thrilling. Then they start to believe it.
In his landmark 1960 book “The Strategy of Conflict,” the Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling described a thought experiment.
You have been abducted. Your captor wants to let you go, but he worries you will report him. Schelling’s solution is strange but logical. Give your captor leverage over you. Commit a blackmail-worthy act in front of him. Now each of you holds something dangerous over the other and you are bound together by it.
A similar dynamic exists among young men who search for belonging online and get drawn into forums full of ideas that were taboo not long ago — antisemitism, racism, sexism, and so on. And it explains what it will take to get them out: more concerted effort by people they can trust.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Boston Globe (paywall)
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Rob Henderson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. He has a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge and is the best-selling author of “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.”
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