Yeh, it's like some Kim Jong Il shit ngl. Remember how North Koreans wept when he died?
Except fear for their life was the clear motivator there. Couldn't tell you what inspired these Americans to emulate them however. Maybe they're playing the long game for the imminent dictatorship.
It's called Sunk Cost Fallacy, a basic concept in economics that even explains how gambling addictions begin and why it's so hard for people to stop until they've lost everything.
Most adult voters are too young to remember it firsthand, hence the perception. Basically anyone under the age of 50 likely won't have a clear picture. For a better understanding:
If you were born in 1980, you would've witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall when you were 9 years old.
Turns out just being able to show up at the office interview wearing khaki pants and making eye contact with your future boss counts for more than optimizing graph trees via psychic technomancy.
Christ, that poor Intel engineer is probably out on the unemployment line right now
As someone with a degree in CompSci I hate how true this is. I knew so many brilliant programmers during my course that I had constant imposter syndrome... and 5 years out some of the ones I once regarded as the most talented still live with their parents because they can't pass the turing test equivalent of an interview lol
One person I knew in particular was so physically incapable of getting through a single conversation without whipping out some pretentious insult that he'd make both Gregory House and Sheldon Cooper look like sycophants by contrast, hahaha