How Communities Founded on Free Inquiry Drift Toward Conformity

The tendency of human groups to drift toward conformity, groupthink, and shared moral certainty

Institutions most closely associated with free speech and open inquiry were created to resist dogma and groupthink. University humanities departments were meant to encourage debate and the free search for truth. The ACLU was founded to defend speech, including unpopular speech. The Freedom From Religion Foundation was created to promote freethought and challenge religious coercion. The American Association of University Professors was formed to protect academic freedom. Scientific journals such as Nature and Scientific American were built on skepticism and the idea that evidence matters more than ideology. Reacting against rigid Christian traditions, especially Catholicism and Calvinism, the Unitarian Universalist Church rejected creeds and affirmed freedom of belief and expression.

Yet many people now experience these same institutions as narrow, partisan, and hostile to viewpoint diversity. Some ideas feel unsafe to express. Questioning dominant views can bring social punishment, professional risk, and career consequences. What once felt open now feels controlled.

This change is often blamed on hypocrisy and corruption. However, there is another explanation. Human groups naturally drift toward conformity, shared moral certainty, and groupthink. Even open institutions are not immune to basic human psychology.

Why Groups Drift Toward Sameness

Humans evolved to survive in groups. For most of our history, belonging meant safety and exclusion meant danger. Agreeing with the group, showing loyalty, and enforcing shared rules helped people survive.

Those instincts did not disappear with education and good intentions. People are still highly sensitive to approval, reputation, and group identity. As a result, groups tend to move toward conformity unless they actively work against it. Openness does not maintain itself. It takes effort.

How Open Institutions Slowly Close

Open institutions rarely shut down debate all at once. The change usually happens quietly.

As groups develop clear identities, they attract people who already agree with them. Those people are more likely to stay, rise in influence, and shape the culture. People who feel out of step often leave or disengage. Over time, the range of acceptable views shrinks without anyone needing to ban anything.

This narrowing happens mostly through culture, not rules. Every organization develops expectations about how people should talk, what language is acceptable, what kinds of arguments sound reasonable, and who is seen as credible. These rules are often unspoken, but they strongly shape who feels comfortable speaking up.

Language plays a big role. Shared terminology and preferred ways of framing issues make communication easier for insiders. However, they also create barriers. People who come from different backgrounds often feel like they are constantly translating or choosing their words carefully. Many eventually stop speaking honestly.

Recruitment reinforces this pattern. Institutions tend to draw from the same schools, professions, and political circles. Over time, shared assumptions harden into “common sense,” and disagreement starts to feel strange and suspicious.

Universities show this clearly. Departments may begin with a mix of viewpoints, but once certain frameworks take hold, hiring, publishing, and promotion tend to favor those who already agree. From the inside, this feels like maintaining standards. From the outside, it looks like ideological uniformity. Because academia leans heavily left, many departments become political monocultures without intending to.

A similar phenomenon is observed in the Unitarian Universalist Church. Although the church abstractly promotes pluralism, free thinking, and diversity, most congregations are ethnic, cultural and political monoliths. Most are composed largely of affluent, highly educated, and politically leftist whites. This shapes the scope of views expressed, the culture, language, and expectations in ways that feel unwelcoming to most racial and ethnic minorities, working-class people, and those who do not share far-left political views.

How Frameworks Turn Into Orthodoxy

Institutions need shared frameworks. These frameworks help people coordinate, communicate, and make sense of complex issues. On their own, frameworks are not a problem.

They become a problem when they harden into dogma or turn into identity markers and moral commitments. When agreement with a framework becomes a test of belonging, dissent starts to carry risk.

This pattern appears across many institutions. Some university departments have taken official positions on controversial political issues, making disagreement feel professionally dangerous. As First Amendment scholar Ross Marchand has argued, once an institution takes an official stance, internal debate becomes much harder.

The ACLU, once known for defending speech regardless of content, now weighs free expression against political and ideological goals. Critics argue that free speech has become conditional. Many universities introduced required DEI statements in hiring and promotion, rewarding adherence to specific political views and punishing those with different viewpoints. Critics compared these to McCarthy-era ideological loyalty tests.

The national Unitarian Universalist Church adopted a particular framework on race and racism as a theological requirement, with dissenting ministers and members punished or sidelined. The Freedom From Religion Foundation enforced a specific view on gender and silenced internal disagreement, including from scientists within its own ranks. Organizations created to resist dogma ended up enforcing it.

Science is not immune either. Scientists are human. They face the same social pressures, cognitive biases, career incentives, and reputational risks as everyone else. Philosopher Thomas Kuhn showed how scientific communities organize around paradigms and resist challenges. Nobel Prize-winning physicists Max Planck and Charles Townes wrote that scientific communities can fall into blinker-wearing ruts.

History provides many examples. Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift was rejected for decades. Acceptance came only after overwhelming evidence and a new generation of scientists. In physics, string theory became dominant, shaping careers and funding. Critics argue that alternative ideas were sidelined not by bans, but by incentives that rewarded conformity.

Even in climate science, where the core finding of human-caused warming is well supported, some researchers report professional risk when questioning narrower issues like models or policy choices. The concern is not denial, but restricted debate.

Across cases, the pattern is the same. A framework dominates. Incentives align around it. Dissent becomes risky. Challenges are treated as threats. Correction comes slowly, often only after strong evidence and strong pushback.

When Ideas Become Moral Tests

The most dangerous shift happens when ideas become moralized.

In my earlier post, “The Human Tendency of Turning Beliefs into ‘Moral Truths,’” I wrote how people naturally turn beliefs into moral signals. What starts as “this seems true” becomes “this is what good people believe.” Once that happens, disagreement feels like a moral offense rather than an intellectual dispute. Ideas stop being treated as claims to examine and start functioning as badges of virtue and loyalty.

When institutions built around inquiry moralize certain positions, openness collapses. Disagreement is framed as harm and moral corruption. Skepticism becomes suspicion. Questioning becomes a character flaw.

Through this moralization, even secular institutions can become just as rigid and self-righteous as religious ones.

The Illusion of Openness

From the inside, monocultures and closed systems often feel open. People argue about tactics, tone, and priorities. This can feel like real debate.

However, as linguist Noam Chomsky said, a system can keep people compliant not by silencing discussion, but by tightly narrowing what topics can be discussed and what ideas can be questioned while encouraging energetic argument inside those boundaries. The debate feels free and vibrant, yet the system’s underlying assumptions remain untouched and continually reinforced.

Social pressure keeps this going. People quickly learn which views are risky. They stop raising them. Over time, silence is mistaken for agreement. Arguments disappear not because they were refuted, but because no one dares to voice them.

Institutions that go further and explicitly reject free inquiry

In recent years, many academic and liberal organizations adopted postmodern activist frameworks that treat free speech and viewpoint diversity as dangerous. Within these frameworks, reason and open inquiry are recast as tools of oppression, and dissent is framed not as disagreement but as harm or bigotry. Institutions that adopt this outlook often turn away from traditional classical liberal values such as freedom of belief, freedom of speech, and open inquiry.

Some organizations also embrace safetyism, portraying members—especially those from designated minority groups—as needing protection from challenging and countering ideas. Intellectual discomfort is redefined as harm, and disagreement becomes a threat rather than a normal part of learning.

Critics argue that the Unitarian Universalist Church’s embrace of these ideas marks a sharp break from liberal religious traditions and has driven away many independent thinkers. Similar concerns have been raised about Scientific American, which critics say has shifted from explaining science to ideological advocacy, symbolized by its endorsement of a presidential candidate. The American Association of University Professors, founded to defend academic freedom, now argues that universities and departments should take partisan positions on contested issues.

At this point, orthodoxy is no longer an unintended outcome. It becomes an explicit goal.

Why This Matters

Not all groups are meant to be open. Partisan political organizations, activist movements, and doctrinal religions exist to promote specific beliefs and create internal conformity. Many people want those spaces.

This essay is not about them. It is about institutions whose purpose was to resist dogma, encourage open inquiry, and protect freedom of thought.

University departments, scientific journals, professional associations, and liberal religious institutions built their credibility on openness, free inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and debate. When they become ideological echo chambers and partisan activist groups, they undermine their essential purposes.

They also lose public trust. Public confidence in universities, science, and expert institutions has fallen. This is not because people have rejected evidence, but because they increasingly see institutions as political actors rather than non-partisan truth-seekers. When the public believes that conclusions are driven by ideology, even accurate claims are dismissed.

Resisting the Drift

There is no permanent fix. Only constant vigilance.

Institutions that value openness must treat conformity and groupthink as an ongoing risk. Cultural monoliths should be seen as a weakness. Widespread moral certainty should raise questions, not end them.

Even in open institutions, people must be regularly reminded why diversity of thought, open disagreement, and critical thinking matter. They must also be regularly reminded of the dangers of echo chambers, groupthink, and moral certainty.

Open inquiry is not natural for humans. Tribalism is. Staying open requires conscious resistance to our instincts. Institutions that forget this do not fail by accident. They drift exactly as human psychology predicts.