What do you mean when you write that it is about ‘limbic system’? For me it suggests that you imagine a big enthusiastic nationalistic crowd—but read https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1504910499418234882 - most of the people are forced to be ‘supporters’. Many of them will learn to be more ‘enthusiastic’ with time—because the Russian society has been trained for that for a long time. For sure there are also true believers—but the whole game is about making everyone look like a believer—it is all about https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/common-knowledge
I have been living in communistic Poland and I attended the 1st of May parades—I remember the coercion, but I also remember how absurd it all felt, I did not understand why it happens when everyone seem to be against it. Maybe I just lived at the very decline of that system in Poland. Only after reading Solzhenitsyn I started to build a theory of how it works. Some people can really just force themselves to believe, this is easier when you don’t have a strong drive to gather information or are incapable processing the contradictions, but on the other hand the more intelligent are also better at resolving the contradictions to the ‘right’ conclusions—delusions are a hell of a drug (in Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn writes about the true communists in the prison camps and the ways they justify their own suffering). For others it is about developing a split personality, something like a https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/imxPxMjXE2JT9rLaF/tulpa-references-discussion that you can switch on when needed. You also would expect the psychopaths to be very successful in that society.
To the extent that there are believers, you won’t change their mind with reason, because their beliefs are governed, guarded and moderated by more basic aspects of the brain—the limbic system is a convenient placeholder for this.
So a problem you are focused on is that minority (or majority) of individual opinions are prevented from being honestly expressed. Flipping a small number of individual opinions, as is your motivation, does not address this problem.
What do you mean when you write that it is about ‘limbic system’? For me it suggests that you imagine a big enthusiastic nationalistic crowd—but read https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1504910499418234882 - most of the people are forced to be ‘supporters’. Many of them will learn to be more ‘enthusiastic’ with time—because the Russian society has been trained for that for a long time. For sure there are also true believers—but the whole game is about making everyone look like a believer—it is all about https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/common-knowledge
I have been living in communistic Poland and I attended the 1st of May parades—I remember the coercion, but I also remember how absurd it all felt, I did not understand why it happens when everyone seem to be against it. Maybe I just lived at the very decline of that system in Poland. Only after reading Solzhenitsyn I started to build a theory of how it works. Some people can really just force themselves to believe, this is easier when you don’t have a strong drive to gather information or are incapable processing the contradictions, but on the other hand the more intelligent are also better at resolving the contradictions to the ‘right’ conclusions—delusions are a hell of a drug (in Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn writes about the true communists in the prison camps and the ways they justify their own suffering). For others it is about developing a split personality, something like a https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/imxPxMjXE2JT9rLaF/tulpa-references-discussion that you can switch on when needed. You also would expect the psychopaths to be very successful in that society.
To the extent that there are believers, you won’t change their mind with reason, because their beliefs are governed, guarded and moderated by more basic aspects of the brain—the limbic system is a convenient placeholder for this.
So a problem you are focused on is that minority (or majority) of individual opinions are prevented from being honestly expressed. Flipping a small number of individual opinions, as is your motivation, does not address this problem.