The Redistribution of Meaning
How We Learned to Think Like the Crowd
In the 20th century, only a few advertisers, political strategists, and psychologists could shape what people believed, what they wanted, and how they behaved.
Some critics warned about these “hidden persuaders.” A few even recognized them as capitalism’s version of Soviet propaganda. But for most people, the forces shaping collective meaning were distant, opaque, and controlled by a small group of experts.
Today’s persuasion industry has been decentralized. Professional journalists are now overshadowed by “Influencers” whose credentials are their camera and charisma. Accounts like Occupy Democrats and Libs of TikTok attract millions of followers who repost their content and adopt their language.
No matter where you land on the political spectrum, you’re sure to find accounts that tell you what to think, how to vote, and whom to hate. That last one is especially popular. The social media political sphere thrives on morality plays, complete with cartoonish villains driven solely by malice.
Political power no longer requires a degree or even an election. All you need is a smartphone. Where people once looked to a strongman to give their lives meaning, they can now choose from a menu of ideologies—each promising clarity, identity, and direction.
But are they choosing these ideologies, or being herded into them?
And if they are being herded, who—or what—is doing the herding?
One of the defining promises of modern life is freedom. From an early age, we’re told that we can be whatever we want to be and do whatever we want to do. We’re no longer constrained by family, class, religion, geography, or other factors that once defined our lives and set our limits.
We have plenty of possibilities. But we lack direction.
And many people find themselves wondering, “Who am I, and what should I do?”
“NPC” memes feature gray, identical faces repeating popular narratives. They portray opponents as brainwashed puppets who simply parrot the slogans they are given.
But they also serve another purpose. They reassure the person sharing it that they are different. They think for themselves. They’re not easily manipulated like those people.
You’ll find NPC memes across the political spectrum. Whether the NPCs wear MAGA hats or COVID masks, the message remains the same: we are independent, you are brainwashed. The meme is new. The existential angst is not.
Erich Fromm recognized this pattern in his 1941 book Escape from Freedom. Writing about the pressures of modern society, he argued that the desire for security and belonging can lead individuals to surrender their sense of self.
[T]he individual ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be. The discrepancy between “I” and the world disappears and with it the conscious fear of aloneness and powerlessness… The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious anymore. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.
We are now tasked with defining our own lives. Conformity provides ready-made belief. It feels like alignment, not control. We no longer carry the burden of finding ourselves. And we no longer fear being alone.
But if identity can be shaped this easily, where does that identity come from?
The Redistribution of Meaning
Once we got meaning from our families, pastors, and peers.
The first two have seen better days. Multigenerational households are increasingly rare, and family estrangement is much more common. “Spiritual but not religious” has become shorthand for “I have no use for organized faith.”
Churches sit empty, but virtual chat rooms are busier than ever. We have not abandoned the search for meaning—we have outsourced it. Today, we rely largely on our online peers. But those peers are often scattered across cities, countries, and time zones. We spend more time talking to strangers online than speaking with the people who live next door.
The Internet democratized propaganda. Everyone has a voice, and persuasion has become participatory. You can promote, attack, and defend your ideas before an international audience.
But many of your ideas came from somebody else. They arrive at your feed through reposts, paraphrases, and misquotes. You see them repeated by people you trust, and they begin to feel familiar. After enough repetition, the idea no longer feels borrowed. It feels like your own.
Before you choose your online friends, algorithms choose what you read. They structure your feed based on your posting history and engagement. They show you content that they think you like.
And, over time, it becomes the content you do like.
Many believe that social media algorithms promote certain political causes and suppress others. Lacking direct access to those algorithms, those allegations can neither be verified nor refuted.
But we do know that social media companies, like all corporations, are built to maximize profit. The longer you stay on a site, the more ads you view and the more likely you are to subscribe. Platforms reward engagement, and the content that generates the most engagement is the kind of material that pisses people off.
This creates powerful social and financial incentives for influencers to produce inflammatory content—and to respond to it in kind. Nuanced views of complex questions rarely travel as far, or as profitably, as loud, simplified denunciations.
Over time, this reshapes behavior. Rudeness becomes normal. Hostility becomes expected. Divides grow wider. Calls for cooperation and courtesy don’t get deplatformed or demonetized. They’re simply ignored. The system doesn’t silence moderation, it makes it irrelevant.
Anger is even easier to internalize than slogans. Ragebait gets projected onto entire groups. Individual misdeeds become evidence of collective guilt. And it feels like righteous outrage against an implacable, irredeemable enemy.
When this emotional tone becomes the default, debate and dialogue begin to collapse. Slogans are safer than questions, and disagreement becomes disloyalty. Insufficient anger invites suspicion; tooth-grinding outrage becomes proof of virtue.
Performative beliefs get likes, shares, and praise. Pavlov trained dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. Social media conditions outrage, certainty, and conformity through the same kind of feedback loop. We learn what to say and how to say it. And all the while, we’re convinced that we speak in our own voice.
The group also enforces norms through negative reinforcement. After you’ve seen members expelled for unacceptable ideas—or been called out for crossing a line—you learn where the boundaries lie. Those boundaries influence how you engage within the group—and outside it.
The lines that mark your territory also shape your thought and your voice. You adopt group language, anticipate reactions, and censor statements that might get you in trouble. And when radical positions are rewarded while nuanced statements are punished, you can expect the group’s positions to become increasingly extreme.
There is no single person who fuels this change. The group becomes a collective strongman, dispensing meaning and claiming authority over its members. There is no one to punish, no one to blame, and after a few purges, no one left to dissent.
The Emergence of Collective Strongmen
For over 200 years we have sorted our political systems into “Right” and “Left,” Conservative and Liberal. Today we are moving toward what Carl Schmitt described as the fundamental political distinction: friend and enemy.
This shift does not require a dictator. All it needs is a system that generates the right combination of cohesion and pressure.
The internet puts libraries at our fingertips and connects us with people around the world. It breaks down borders and gives dissenters a voice and a network. But even as it expands understanding, it intensifies division. Many now use that connection to demand stronger boundaries and stricter conformity.
Perceived threats drive greater cohesion. Social media amplifies conflict and rewards the language of threat. It reduces arguments to morality plays and turns identity into declarations of belief. It produces the conditions under which strongmen flourish—and an environment in which groups, not just individuals, can become tyrants.
These groups are not shooting their opponents or overthrowing governments. But they create an atmosphere that serves a strongman’s purposes. They normalize ostracism, collective blame, and hatred. Those conditioned to accept this behavior online will have little hesitation carrying those attitudes into the streets.
When loyalty is prioritized over truth and the collective is weaponized against individual dissent, the conditions for strongman rule are already in place. A strongman does not require centralized authority or visible enforcement. Decentralized suppression of dissent and social pressure can be just as effective—and much harder to resist.
Defeating the Collective Strongman
The collective strongman is not confined to any ideology, community, or platform. These dynamics can occur in any group. And, in every case, its most ardent members will sincerely deny that it exists.
It happens to all of us. We tie our identity to the causes we oppose. We demonize the other for trivial misdeeds and stay silent at greater sins from our own side. We use the Internet as an emotional dumping ground, saying to anonymous accounts what we would never repeat in public.
We all feed the collective strongman. And he feeds on us.
The collective strongman offers clarity in a confusing world. He provides belonging and identity. Joining brings moral certainty, emotional satisfaction, and camaraderie. Before long, the doubts fade and the slogans sound like common sense. They become so familiar that you can hardly imagine they came from somewhere else. Participation doesn’t feel like complicity when everyone is doing it.
But sooner or later, those boundaries that once felt comfortable start closing in. You notice there’s no nuance, no dialogue, no independent thought. Every day the list of acceptable beliefs gets shorter and the list of forbidden topics grows longer. And you begin to realize you’re wearing someone else’s personality.
When that moment arrives, you have a choice. You can swallow your doubts and keep living a lie, hoping it will feel like truth again. Or you can walk away.
The choice is not between left and right, or good and evil.
It is between reacting and thinking.
