Social Contagion and the Death of the Individual
I used to think teenagers just wanted to fit in. Turns out many of them now want to disappear into the crowd so completely that even their own biology has become negotiable.
We are watching the most successful conformity experiment in human history play out in real time. It’s not new—conformity is as old as the tribe—but the speed, the scale, and the ruthlessness of it are unprecedented. And the primary vector is social contagion.
The most explosive example is the trans phenomenon among youth. In 2012, the prevalence of gender dysphoria in adolescents was roughly 0.01–0.03 %. By 2024, in some Western high schools it is pushing 10–20 %. Entire friend groups—usually clusters of girls—are suddenly “trans” or “non-binary.” TikTok videos titled “Top Signs You’re Actually Trans” rack up tens of millions of views. Detransitioners later describe the same story: loneliness → online immersion → new identity → social reward → medical intervention. This is not organic discovery. This is contagion, pure and simple, spread through the most addictive medium ever invented.
But it doesn’t stop at gender.
Look at the sudden explosion of multiple personalities (DID) on the same platforms. A decade ago, genuine dissociative identity disorder was vanishingly rare and usually tied to extreme childhood trauma. Today teenagers are posting “alter intros” like they’re Pokémon cards. Same mechanism: see it, want the attention, mimic it, get rewarded with likes and new “system” friends.
Then there are the softer, socially approved contagions. Movember? On the surface it’s harmless—grow a moustache, raise money for prostate cancer. But dig one inch deeper and you see another ritual of performative sameness: every November thousands of men suddenly look identical for thirty days because the algorithm told them to. It’s a low-stakes rehearsal for the higher-stakes ones.
The cell-phone trance is the baseline contagion we all live in now. Walk through any school hallway: a moving carpet of bowed heads, identical black mirrors glowing in every hand. No one taught them to do this in 1995. It spread like a virus because the device itself is engineered to hijack dopamine loops and social comparison.
Even more chilling is the secondary contagion—the kids who never declare a new identity themselves yet become the most fanatical enforcers of the trend. They may keep their birth names and bodies intact, but they fly the flags, wear the pins, and patrol the language with religious zeal. Question the wisdom of putting a confused fifteen-year-old girl on testosterone and you are not merely wrong—you are evil, a bigot, a literal threat to their friends’ existence. They will end friendships, get teachers fired, and destroy reputations without a second thought. Not conforming is acceptable only if you loudly and performatively worship those who do. Silence is violence, but enthusiastic agreement is the bare minimum for continued social existence. This is virtue-signalling turned into a blood sport.
All of these—trans identification, faux-DID, Movember, the phone hunch, and now the compulsory cheerleading brigade—share the same DNA:
- Hyper-visible modeling (everyone sees everyone else doing it instantly).
- Immediate social reward for compliance.
- Severe social punishment (or simple exclusion) for refusal.
This is not the conformity of the 1950s, where the pressure was to own the same car or wear the same haircut. That was mild. Today’s version is existential: conform or be declared a bigot, a TERF, a toxic male, a science-denier, a hater. The stakes feel life-and-death because, for an adolescent, social death is physical death.
Why are young people so susceptible?
Because adolescence has always been the developmental stage where the psyche is most desperate to trade individuality for belonging. The brain is literally rewiring itself, pruning neural pathways, and the terror of being ostracised is biologically overwhelming. Evolution wired us this way: the tribe was survival. Step out of line in the Paleolithic and you were saber-tooth food.
What’s new is that the “tribe” is now eight billion people connected by servers. The village of 150 souls has become a global panopticon where deviance is visible to everyone, all the time. And the elders who used to temper youthful hysteria with wisdom have themselves been silenced or converted.
This is where the agenda creeps in.
A homogenized population is infinitely easier to manage. If everyone identifies the same, desires the same, fears the same, and polices the same taboos, you no longer need barbed wire or gulags. The herd disciplines itself. DEI, ESG, “inclusivity” training—these are not about diversity at all. They are the new catechism of the One Allowed Opinion. Notice how every corporation, every university, every government suddenly speaks with the exact same vocabulary within weeks of a new sacred cause being born. That is engineered contagion at the adult level.
The kids are simply the beta test.
We used to celebrate the rebel, the misfit, the one who saw something the rest of us missed. Now we diagnose them, medicate them, cancel them, or convince them their difference is a disorder to be cured by surgery and pronouns. Being “different” has been rebranded as privilege or hatred; the only safe difference is the pre-approved, rainbow-branded kind that requires no courage whatsoever.
I keep thinking of that old Asch conformity experiment—lines on a card, one dissenter against a room of actors. Most people caved. But a few didn’t. Those few are the shrews now. And the room has grown very, very large.
So, what do we do?
First, admit what we’re seeing: a civilization-scale psychological operation whose endgame is the liquidation of the sovereign individual. Second, protect the young. That means ruthless boundaries on devices, real-world communities that are not mediated by algorithms, and adults who model the courage to be disliked.
Because if we lose another generation to this hive-mind cult, there will be no one left who even remembers what it felt like to have a self that wasn’t crowdsourced.
Stay shrew-ed, my friends. The herd is thundering. Don’t get trampled.
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