Comment by roysting

I call it the 2N; novelty and naïveté. People like the different new things that let them do things they’ve never done before, and they also don’t want to think about the long term effects or consequences of their actions.

It comes into play in many human behaviors like objectively horrible choices in romantic partnerships, drug use and reckless behavior and actions in general, most forms of fraud where promises are made and/or imagination is spurred, as well as various forms of political decisions in democracies where people support or believe lying liars in order to win the “fell for it again” award.

There seems to be something inherently and deeply prone to clearly self-harming behavior in many if not all humans. Willingly simply adopting and excusing mass surveillance tracking devices where people would have resisted being injected with a tracker otherwise, is probably a good example of that. “No no” says one rat to his buddy “it’s just a box where all the sudden little lumps of peanut butter started appearing two nights ago. I’m sure it will just be free peanut butter forever and there are no other reasons why that peanut butter could be appearing there. It would definitely never be in order to condition us to feel comfortable with entering the box and spreading the message that this is where you get the free peanut butter!”