“Most People Are Nothing but Mindless Parrots” — A Defence, A Rebuttal, and the Quiet Truth in the Middle

The line is doing two jobs at once. It flatters the reader for being one of the ones who isn’t. It also describes something most of us, on a long enough timeline, actually do.

We absorb opinions from the three or four people we trust most, the platforms we spend the most time on, and the social groups we want to belong to. We then experience those opinions as our own, defending them with surprising heat when challenged.

This is not a moral failing. It is, in cognitive terms, an efficiency. Forming every opinion from first principles every day would be exhausting and largely impossible. The brain outsources because it has to.

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The trap is forgetting we’re doing it. The cure isn’t becoming a contrarian — contrarians are usually parroting a different group, just with worse manners. The cure is the small, slightly uncomfortable habit of asking yourself, once a week, “whose voice is this, actually?”

Most of the time the answer will be yours. Sometimes it won’t. The point isn’t to be original about everything. The point is to know the difference.