In the intense politics of this election year you may have heard the term “pipeline” used (usually said as “left wing pipeline” or “far right pipeline”), now if you haven’t heard this or just don’t understand what it means I’ll explain the generally accepted definition. A pipeline is a path that people follow in the media they consume, which leads them to more extreme ideas. This can be as simple as just following the automatically playing videos on youtube, this can start with science videos, go to videos about criticizing education, to videos claiming the earth is flat, with all the videos making the same claim to just be telling the truth.
It’s not hard to see how this can be problematic with people being moved to points they would have previously said were absurd. Many of these people who are part of the pipeline (online content creators or such) commonly don’t know that they are, some are even inside of pipelines themselves.
In some cases pipelines can be good though, imagine someone who goes from geocentrism (incorrect belief that the earth is the center of the universe) to finding more scientific videos to coming to conclusions that are more reasonable. With ideas like these it can seem that the pipeline is easy to escape, but this is false, the end points of pipelines that are in places of high emotion and collective isolation.
The isolation of groups tends to cause emotion to manifest in multiple ways. One of these ways is fear that everyone is against you and you specifically, this is emphasized in the stereotype of “crazy guy thinks the government is after him”. Although this stereotype is commonly used for humor, it still affects those in the endpoints of the pipelines. Another way that emotion is manifested is false bravery, after all who wouldn’t be brave to stand up to the government, the general public, scientific consensus, and just about everyone else. This paints the rest of the world as villains, and in the words of Will Wood in his song “main character”, “There are villains everywhere, that’s how I know that I’m the hero.”. These combined forces between making everyone against you and you against everyone leads to a strong need to rebel against the status quo.
Helping people who are in these situations is a difficult task, because standard forms of argument can prove ineffective due to the beliefs they have adopted from the extreme ends of the pipelines. Methods that would work better would be persistence or providing examples of people who fell into similar beliefs and moved on from them. In conclusion ideological pipelines can be very harmful, so it is important to be aware of your media habbits and to fact check the videos your see or look at alternate sources. Additionally even though people who are in these pipelines are often reluctant to break free, it is still worth it to try to help them get back on their feet.
