I wonder how much surveillance and threat of surveillance encourage people to self-censor and find and attach themselves to "right" opinions and behaviors to avoid group abandonment.

I think sometimes that humans as a species have self-domesticated to prefer pro-social behavior over individual expression; what if looming surveillance and the threat of punishment encourage us to continue our self-domestication even in private?

I notice sometimes people (myself included) prefer to be polite to even just expressing their personal preferences.

I wonder how much this has to do with a lack of trust. With our distrust of the government/state and a growing distrust in academia, if you're not numbed into a state of apathy, where do you go for information? How do you know how to form an opinion? It's more or less an open secret that most people are not raised to think independently and reason through information to come to conclusions ("opinions").

Further, I'm going to venture to guess there are people who don't even know what's important enough to them to go out and seek information in order to develop an opinion. They get socially reactive - scared of the judgment of others - and try to barricade themselves with "right" opinions and information to save face instead of developing their identities - working toward something - through the information they consume.

I'm not super informed on what's going on in war zones. I know I'm ignorant by choice. Sometimes I feel "bad" (socially guilty) for not being "informed" but then I just admit to myself, I have my own stuff going on, I only have so many hours in the day, and what on earth would I do with such information anyway? How does it inform my life in a super practical, real-time manner?