The snowflake syndrome is the modern means of building a minority political bloc - for any underrepresented group or condition, a representative comes along and

The snowflake syndrome is the modern means of building a minority political bloc - for any underrepresented group or condition, a representative comes along and declares themselves champion of the people(the people that they represent, that is), and encourages shaming of the rest as a form of unification. It's the shaming that eventually got to me. It's such a prolific and harmful tactic. The people who do it the most tend to lack virtue themselves, when held up to the light. And it doesn't matter how well your internal sense of guilt works - you can always be judged poorly for reasons that become obviously unfair when pushed to far-reaching conclusions. It encourages you to polarize into a completely fanatical or disengaged state, without a healthy middle. If we've improved any, it's in that outright dehumanization is less common now, replaced with convenient euphemisms that diffuse blame. Stoicism has the appeal of "It doesn't matter how bad the outside world gets - I am going to do my own thing and fix up my own principles and actions." It encourages you to work on small everyday behaviors instead of constantly diverting your attention to the Big Important Problem that the news is currently pushing at you(and that you can't do much about, without derailing your entire life).