Discrimination in a world physically influenced by what their inhabitants believe

Let's take an imaginary world where, without its inhabitants realizing it, everything is physically influenced by what people thinks, by what they believe, by how they see the world. Of course the opinion of a single person has no effect, but if a lot of people think that something is true, in the place where they live that thing becomes in fact true. For simple things like legends becoming reality I don't think there are consistency problems. But what happens if discrimination against a small group of people becomes widespread?

Let's take for example an emperor of a large country that decides to use a small neighboring country as scapegoat and sends bards to spread lies about them through the entire empire, accusing them of any possible evil. The majority of the inhabitants of the empire will believe such lies and start to discriminate and hate the people of the neighboring country. But what will happen to the discriminated people if their number is very inferior to the inhabitants of the empire? Is there a way for them to be able to mantain their identity, their individuality? Or will they start to gradually become exactly like the prejudice about them, like the imaginary enemy that the emperor accuses them to be? And how this gradual change can affect them without them noticing?

A sudden mass brainwashing sounds a bit stupid, so I'd like to define in a realistic way how such a process could work from the psychological point of view of the victims.

posted over 9 years ago

Soel‭

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