Imagine you're a farmer and you own 500 sheep. What would make herding and feeding easier, for them to all act the same and predictably, or for each one to have a unique personality that you have to figure out?

Logistically, how can you herd sheep if they don't move as a group? Does an "exceptionally behaved sheep" mean anything if all you want is their wool and meat? It makes more sense to minimize bad behaviors than to maximize good ones if you want an obedient herd that is easy to handle and requires the least amount of work.

Imagine you own a company with 500 employees. Is it better for your employees to act the same so they're modular and replaceable and interchangable? Or do you want each employee to have a lot of personality and uniqueness, good and bad?

Imagine you own a country that's taxing hundreds of millions of people for profit, would you want to have a standardized type of human that you can predict and know how it reacts, or would you rather have a wide variety of behaviors, including some rebellious and violent people?

Imagine you run an army, what is your primary goal to instill in the soldiers? Obedience. This is what Boot Camp is all about. This is why Prussia lost the Battle of Jena in 1806, and consequently created the Prussian Schooling System, to train soldiers to be hyper-obedient. The Prussian Schooling System was copied to the US in the late 1800s and re-adapted for factory working instead of solders, but still with obedience as it's central fixture. This became the American public school system.

We as a society are honed by our education, by our media, and by each other, to shape us in to cogs of a machine. To be modular, replaceable units that can easily be swapped out and herded as a culture to drive behaviors like consumerism. This makes ruling a large number of people much easier. Hence why obedient societies like China and the US are able to maintain so many people in one giant state, under a one-size-fits-all structure. Because through the legal system, through the prison system, and through the many other hundreds of systems we interact with from the mainstream of society to the fringes, are all on a treadmill pushing everything towards the desired modular unit design for a culturally ideal human being.

Not out of cruelty, but out of practicality, you see.

Understanding the motivations of the systems we live within is the only way to deprogram those cultural biases from our minds and to see the world clearly. To feel independently happy, and free. Not pushed around by cultural systems designed to make us obedient to those who wish to own us. To realize we don't need wars that aren't defensive wars. To stop supporting side-vs-side tribalism and focus on helping all people improve the world. Trying to bring everyone up, instead of bringing others down. Avoiding divide and conquer. Avoiding being told how to feel, or what you should care about and what you shouldn't care about. You get to decide that, not others. Don't give that power away.