Remember the scene in Shawshank Redemption when Brooks kills himself because he can't make it on the outside? He was a liberal man in a free world. He couldn't hack it. Years of deferring his decision-making to outside sources had weakened him to the point that, when faced with no clues, no external prodding, and no prefabricated agenda, he had no idea what to do with himself. Seeing no other options, he decided to take his own life. It is a sad and tragic sequence in the film.
I have noticed that when talking to liberal friends of mine, especially those who have been liberals so long they don't remember why they became liberals in the first place, there is a sort of unwritten assumption that the way they think is the only way to think. They aren't even dogmatic about it on the surface; the problem is an underlying one. The problem isn't political, religious, or any other surface issue. It's deeper than that. THEY HAVE BEEN INSTITUTIONALIZED. They have long-since swallowed the proverbial blue pill, and regardless of how smart they are, rich they are, successful and talented they are, they react with fear and loathing toward people on the "outside."
This is how otherwise-smart, formerly-open-minded people become hateful, small-minded zealots. They have been institutionalized. They have been cowed by contentious, arrogant, self-righteous women for the most part, and have learned to hate anyone who reminds them that they are prisoners (this perhaps explains the juvenile anger toward the MGTOW "community," but that's another point for another time). They embrace their confinement in order to survive it.
Faced with a free (read: hopeful) specimen, caged birds will murder the free to retain the integrity of their nonexistent souls. I wrote the line years ago, "I know why the caged bird hates your guts." Because I do.
Rather than resist the guards, the caged birds will befriend them. Instead of being depressed about never being allowed beyond the walls of the institution, they train themselves to see the walls as the literal edge of the world. To leave the institution is to sail your ship off the edge of the sea into oblivion. They are like the caged ape in the zoo, who can hear the outside world, but has resigned himself to the bars. If he has any soul at all, he will be unbearably depressed. So he learns to annihilate that as well, until he is nothing but a shell of nutrition for his captors to feed on at will.
And as anybody who has ever met a liberal man is certainly aware, his captors do indeed feed on him. Indeed, they see it as their right. The smug, new-age succubus who believes she is enlightened is the missing link between man and the animal kingdom. She is proof of hell itself, and will drag anyone and everything with her if she can.
It is fundamentally and vitally important to retain that spark of hope in the face of unbeatable odds and unbearable despair. It is essential to NOT become the John Hurt character in Midnight Express, or Brooks in Shawshank Redemption. It is important to believe in an actual way out, and not a false, temporary one, that is in fact another shackle.
The Brad Davis character in Midnight Express eventually escapes. Tim Robbins' character successfully retains the spark of hope within. It drives him mad, of course, but it is at least a free form of madness. He successfully instills this hope within the Morgan Freeman character, and at the end, they are both free men indeed, in the flesh and on the beach, almost certainly beside themselves with a joy that they don't know what to do with.
Keep the faith, even if it drives you mad. Better the madness of hope, than the soft complacency of institutionalization, from which no escape is possible.
