It's a perverted version of Pascal's wager, the "You lose nothing by pretend-believing" argument of theologians, but reinvented for an age where social mobs are the new wrathful God. If you stick your neck out and refuse the newspeak, you present a target for Them, you're essentially betting they're too weak to do anything to you, a bet you could either win or lose. But if you comply, then you're safe no matter what the actual influnce The Mob has. The Nash equilibrium is always choosing "COMPLY".
The classic mistake that Pascal and everyone using his argument to argue for their favorite God lies in the simplifying assumption :
- Compliance is cheap, low-risk and fixed-cost relative to taking a stand
Which gets less and less true as the Wrathful God (or His spokespeople) sees you're completely submitting and realizes they can continue making more and more increasingly humiliating demands. Soon enough, you discover you wish you had drawn the red line earlier.
Yeah, I generally either mock them or go into malicious compliance mode. Once they realise I really don't care about losing my job they stop pretending to care about this stuff
“Political correctness is America's newest form of intolerance, and it is especially pernicious because it comes disguised as tolerance. It presents itself as fairness, yet attempts to restrict and control people's language with strict codes and rigid rules. I'm not sure that's the way to fight discrimination. I'm not sure silencing people or forcing them to alter their speech is the best method for solving problems that go much deeper than speech.”
― George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?
Enabling bullies in their social dominance games isn’t being kind.