The politics aspect is much more driven by identity and social group than by sunk cost or refusal to have buyer’s remorse. A singular respected leader can turn the ship - churches and pastors were critical in the US civil rights movement, for example - but groups can be more nebulous without a particular leadership structure, like how difficult it is for people to leave Twitter: even though most users agree the experience has significantly degraded, there is no critical mass agreed on a replacement.

The more nebulous groups can break up - Twitter’s engagement is declining - it’s just slow. Maybe years or decades slow to get to the point it’s no longer one of the dominant social media. So I guess keeping the social connections open (giving someone who wants to make a major change an option to still have a friend or family member who will talk to them after), and patience.

buyers remorse is admitting it. you are thinking more the sunk cost fallacy I think.

An easy way out. That’s it.

If it’s about a material thing - being able to throw it away and buy a “correct” one without worrying about recouping any money.

If it’s about politics - open path to changing your opinion without constantly being called out for your previous opinion. I feel like changing your mind is punished to an extreme. You need to have always believed the “correct” thing without showing any doubt or you’re out. And this is common to many political groups.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Fallacy_effect

I think the root of this and many others in other society is a failure to understand and accept features of human nature. It is our tendency to lie to ourselves in certain situations. One needs to learn to distrust yourself in some ways. To be on the lookout for where you might be inclined to avoid looking at or accepting the truth. To do that your also need to realize that your tendency to do that doesn’t make you a horrible person, it’s just human nature.

it’s especially a big deal when it comes to battle passes in video games. you know how many people bend over backwards to justify fortnite gatekeeping most everything? especially the stuff that’s not time gated but just doesn’t appear in the shop too often. Then they throw a hissy fit when someone buys it

the obvious first solution is to condemn fomo practices, but in the fortnite case, the devs would rather go bankrupt and die

I know it’s easy to say and hard to do for most, but you just have to find contentment with what you have. I have everything I need, most of what I want, and I don’t particularly feel like I’m missing anything. My sole focus now is saving as much as I can so I can retire early and, in effect, buy myself more free time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_justification

In general, there’s the sunk cost fallacy. But I think there’s an additional, related component in politics. Trump in particular but many politicians (and whatever Elon Musk is) are conmen and not particularly smart. They’re just charismatic — I don’t personally get Trump or Musk’s charisma but apparently a lot of people do. (And their tweets alone are evidence enough to prove they aren’t clever.)

And so any time Trump or Musk or whomever does something completely idiotic, supporters compensate by telling themselves it’s all 12 dimensional chess and they’re actually brilliant. It’s just too embarrassing for them to admit they were conned by a fool. So, they double down to compensate. But ultimately, most conmen aren’t smart. That’s why they’re conmen.

I made a bad choice and it’s time to cut my losses

You’ve received some good replies on this question, but I think there’s also another question at play: an offshoot of identity politics. Many people wrap their personal identity around things. If you question the thing, or put restrictions on it, people take it as an attack on their persona since the thing and their person are so interwoven. You can see this with things like guns, vehicles (motorcycles, car vs truck, auto vs manual, brand x vs brand y), video game consoles, physical media, etc.

I wouldn’t know, I’ve never made a bad purchase in my life and I’ll fight you if you say otherwise 😭

I think all of this is a huge problem in the world today.

Always have been a problem. It was just a lot less consumerist-focused in the past.

I just read a text from Pascal that he wrote somewhere in the year 1656 and in which he was discussing how a bunch of people from the Sorbonne university (they were not your average angry lynching mob, they were scholars) were asking for another one to be severely punished for something he had said in favor of some text they deemed heretic (which was no joke, back then). Pascal then explains they refused to change their mind when they were faced first with the fact that all the guy said was that he could not find any occurence of that heresy in said text (they even refused to read the text to see by themselves when he proposed to do so); and then when they were told that this dude they wanted so badly to punishe (for something he did not say) was indeed agreeing with them on the condemnation of that heresy only refusing to blame it on that specific author since he never wrote that. Their reply? He still deserved to be punished because of his attitude. I have grossly over-simplified the thing but that is indeed the core idea: they did not like the dude and his tone and wanted to make him pay for that, they openly said fuck it to any fact demonstrating them wrong. And those people were scholars.

This happened some 370 years ago but it could be happening at this very moment in (too) many universities—one would just need to replace ‘heresy’ with any of the ‘sensitive’ topics we consider so much more important nowadays.

And I have little doubt it will keep on happening under a variety of guises. Probably even much more frequently, seeing the world-wide rise of proud idiocracies, and their proud idiot leaders, and the rise of all those communitarisms that that thrive on hating on one another, almost everywhere.

Edit: typos and a few minor changes.