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Notes -
I had a therapist who strongly believed this, and considered having anything other than "fitting in" with one's peer group as highest priority in determining one's beliefs to itself constitute some manner of psychological disorder. Her go-to defense for any view was to cite its popularity, and even more so her go-to criticism of a position is that it's "unpopular" or "weird." She was a firm believer in vox populi, vox Dei, and when I pointed out that this was the framework of her arguments and that I, as a monarchist, rejected it utterly, she was completely at a loss. I mean, stunned silence for quite a noticeable length. It seemed so deeply imbedded in her worldview, so base an assumption, that she didn't seem to know how to respond to having it so bluntly challenged.
(I'm also once reminded of a blog comment exchange — I think it was pre-disqus The American Conservative — involving the Japanese honne/tatemae distinction, that also included something like a defense of "social harmony over truth." Though, there the argument was that Westerners have an "overly simplistic" and "narrow" view of what "truth" is, thanks mostly to Plato (this is the main part that made this exchange memorable), and thus fail to grasp that "social consensus" is "truth," just as much as personal understanding of the facts is also "truth," they're just different kinds of truth. Needless to say, most everyone else commenting at TAC disagreed with this view.)
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