- Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
- Euripedes
There's actually a name for the phenomenon David mentions:
Dunning–Kruger effect.
I discussed it a while back on the site here:
The Dunning-Kruger Effect and Self-Improvement.
Anyway, no sense worrying much about it. Something I realized a long time ago was that the louder and more frantically preached the belief, the more desperately the individual needs others to listen in order to help him validate his belief in it. Things that are worth believing typically don't need angry evangelists; the real world usefulness of the belief will tend to outweigh the angry screeds of a thousand rage-filled pushers of an opposing, less useful belief.
Not always at all times in every place - sometimes an anti-intellectual, anti-free market regime like the Khmer Rouge wins out and murders or drives out the most intelligent, driven, ambitious, and educated top third of the country - but over time, natural selection is hard at work on populaces themselves, and not only mere individuals.
Another thing to be wary of is the effect of coming into contact with people who attack your viewpoint and the polarizing effect this has. You might be only slightly liberal or slightly conservative, or slightly pro-Apple or slightly pro-Android, but as soon as you hit those YouTube comments or 4chan or 9gag and read the mocking, vitriolic comments from the other side, it forces you hard into one corner or the other, and now you're a super liberal or a super conservative, or a super Apple fanboy or a super Android fanboy, or whatnot. Battles force people to pick sides and unify against the opposing side.
If you don't want to feel these battle emotions, try to stay away from places where people duke it out.
Unfortunately, that's most of the Internet... :/
But look for islands of tranquility and open-minded discussion instead of venomous back-and-forth.
One trend I've noticed recently is that websites that boom tend to start off with unified visions, where everybody is onboard with the message and it's remarkably tranquil and homogenous. They get bigger, and then they attract their opposites, who come in to troll them and battle with them over their beliefs.
I used to enjoy 9gag for relaxing, for instance, but lately it's become increasingly political with Android-Apple stuff and real-gamer-not-a-real-gamer stuff, which is just turning me off of it, because all that stuff does is piss you off, when the whole point of going on a humor site in the first place was to
relax, not to have your political position on irrelevant issues dictated to you by 13 year olds. There's also this big gamer-non-gamer thing on there similar to the alpha-beta thing of the manosphere, where everyone tries to tell everyone else how much of a gamer he is or how much that other guy is NOT a real gamer. Whichever side of the divide you fall on, the model or operating system of your phone or your status as a "gamer" or not are just about the stupidest reasons imaginable for people to form ranks over. Even alpha-beta is better than that. Once emotional warfare propaganda starts showing up on a site, that's when you know it's jumped the shark.
Chase
