The Keymaker. 🔑 (Yearning arc) 🐍

Working at Oculus would have been an utter waste of my time except for one thing. While I was there, I realized what's wrong with leftists. Not that they have been programmed, that's obvious. Not why they have been programmed. For power, that's obvious, too. But how they have been programmed. The exact method that their moral compass has been destroyed works like this: Target a bunch of people with very few deeds and accomplishments, such as young people or incompetent people, or incompetent young people. Create for them an environment where they are rewarded with moral approval, not for what they do, but for believing certain ideas. The ideas don't have to be outrageous, or absurd, or have anything to do with what you actually need them to believe. In fact, it's better to start with something innocuous. Why? Because the goal isn't to install those beliefs at all. The goal is to repeat this process until you create a person who measures his moral worth by what he believes, not what he does. Keep at this until you have created a mass of people who not only reward themselves with a feeling of moral superiority for believing the right things, but who will reward each other for believing orthodox things, and who will compete with each other, not to do the most good, but to have the most orthodox beliefs. Now, change one of the propositions you have programmed them with to a slightly more radical version of itself, and hold this up as a more correct version of the old belief, which has been newly discovered by scholarly investigations into culture and moral philosophy. Sit back, watch, and give them a few weeks to compete with each other to adopt the new belief, and to condemn the "evil" of anyone who believes the old belief, the very thing they believed last month. Repeat this process until they are used to rapidly changing their entire belief system in response to an external cue. Congratulations, you have a population of entirely programmable people whose moral compass is not just broken, but entirely non-existent. They don't care what any person in front of them actually does. Only that he believe the orthodox thing, which they just learned about in last week's memo. They are willing to do anything, so long as it is done in support of their current belief system, which can be replaced whenever it's convenient to do so. They are willing to burn down an entire city with no qualms whatsoever if they are doing it in support of the idea that black lives matter. They are willing to murder a man in front of his children, and it doesn't matter if his actions were entirely peaceful and good, because all that matters to them is whether he believes the correct things or not. And a man who builds cheap spaceflight for the human race, develops viable electric cars to save the environment, restores voices to the voiceless, and plans, for his next trick, to heal the blind... well, all those are deeds, so none of them matter. The only thing that matters is that he told people to vote republican once, which is wrongthink. So what you have a horde of communist zombies, who can be steered to shuffle in any direction and attack the living, eat their brains, and turn them into more zombies. Once someone becomes one of the zombies, you can't cure him, because a moral compass can only be repaired by understanding the consequences of actions in a new way... and they don't care about actions or consequences. They only care about beliefs, and not about consequences at all. Their moral compasses aren't just broken. They are absent. There's nothing to repair. You have to understand that the zombies are zombies now.