People Attack Increased Options Because They Feel Like Their Existing Choices Will Become Outliers

The key to understanding the world today is in this comic right here.
this Boomer comic has been making the rounds on Facebook for at least a decade,
and it portrays a brave, older Marine in a coffee shop where the barista says,
“can I interest you in a soy latte?”
he says, no.
“just coffee, black.”
“caramel Macchiato?”
“just coffee,
black.”
“iced peppermint mocha?”
“just coffee, black”
“frappe?”
now, the first thing you'll notice is that this scenario has never occurred once
anywhere in the history of the world.
and if you say, well, yeah,
but it's just a joke,
I'm saying the thing that it's exaggerating has never occurred.
but the perception of a world that caused the artist to create this
and motivated people to share this millions of times
is incredibly important, because in reality,
no one ever took his black coffee from him.
every shop like this has black coffee.
he can also get it at any gas station or any McDonald's drive through
or from home. all that happened is the range of options for other people expanded.
and he perceived that as persecution,
as his choice having been taken away.
this is not political. this is a “human nature” thing.
most people are not satisfied to simply have the option
to live their life the way they want.
they also want to feel normal.
they want to walk around
and see that most other people have made the same choice they made.
and if over time,
they see that their own personal preference has become less popular,
and even worse, is now seen as being basic or unsophisticated,
they will perceive the mere existence of those other options
as a criticism of them, even if they've never heard anybody voice that criticism.
this is why it's so important for some people
to imagine the archetype of the “angry vegan”
even though 1) I have never run into one of those people in real life.
not even once and 2) meat, statistically,
is more popular now than it has ever been in the history of the world.
there is basic psychological comfort
in knowing that you're conforming to what the world wants,
and in the reassurance that that world is not going to change.
and this is why it doesn't help to simply tell people
you can keep doing the thing you were doing.
no one's stopping you from drinking your coffee.
because it's not about the coffee.
it's the fear that if everybody else stops drinking coffee the way I drink it,
then I will become an outcast.
and that is scary to someone who suddenly
is remembering how they have always treated outcasts.