You put a bunch of people, be they left-wing, right-wing, religious or secular in the same spot, and their talk will be influenced and perhaps dominated by grou

You put a bunch of people, be they left-wing, right-wing, religious or secular in the same spot, and their talk will be influenced and perhaps dominated by group politics. A significant minority with an internalised sense of lack will compete for status and power in a self-righteous manner. i.e. by striving to promulgate the most virtuous opinions, and, as a corollary, ostracising and denouncing those who voice wrong or unfashionable opinions. The rest of the group will go along with it because they don't want to be individually targeted. Even though they may privately suspect that what's going on is bad and that true virtue does not depend on one's opinions. I watched some of Milo Yiannoupoulos's recent lectures in his tour of American universities. He claims that the purpose of attending university is to be exposed to difficult and disturbing ideas. I'm not sure if this is true. Perhaps it ought to be true. Yet I suspect that no one knows what the real purposes of universities are because they are an evolved tradition. What we do know is that most of the early European universities and their colleges were founded with the intention of preserving and promoting orthodoxy: combatting heresies, training priests, etc. What we're seeing at present in the anglospherical universities is simply the emergence of a different sort of orthodoxy.