Have you ever watched someone online build their own reality from scratch, reject every basic fact, and demand that the entire world clap for them?
We see it everywhere right now. A guy sits on camera, completely unbothered by actual psychology or science, making up rules as he goes. He claims he has free will, tells his audience to punish an innocent dog, and then tries to destroy anyone who dares disagree.
The worst part isn’t even him. It’s the followers.
A crowd of people with zero background or knowledge piles on, echoing the same talking points. Why? Because it feels good. Joining a mob gives you an instant dopamine hit—a cheap, addictive rush of feeling morally superior. It’s the exact same psychological trap that has turned ordinary people into totalitarians throughout history, whether we’re talking about dark historical atrocities or modern internet witch hunts.
You can see this exact same destructive groupthink playing out in the dog training world, too.
The industry is split right into warring tribes. One side wants to ban everything they don’t like; the other digs their heels in. But here is the hard reality nobody wants to post on a trendy social media feed: pure, feel-good reinforcement alone often doesn’t work on severe, dangerous aggression. When handlers are stripped of real tools and real solutions by people who only understand slogans, dogs get set up to fail—and it’s going to get a lot of animals killed.
Yet, nuance doesn’t go viral. Dumbed-down outrage does.
We saw this exact mechanism play out during COVID, too. Millions of people got so hooked on compliance and fear that they started wishing actual harm on their neighbors just for making a different medical choice. The veneer of a civilized society vanishes the second people get high on the collective rush of excluding an “enemy.”
When you refuse to play along with the garbage—when you decline to hand out cheap validation to people desperate for a guru—they don’t just walk away. They keep circling back, banging on the door, because your refusal breaks their illusion.
It is exhausting. But staying grounded in actual reality, refusing to hand out unearned stamps of approval, and calling out the mob for what it is remains the only way to keep your head clear in a world losing its mind.