I had a memorable flight from Kyiv to Amsterdam seated next to a Chinese resident of Britain with a Yorkshire accent thick enough to cut. Somehow the conversation turned to Taiwan.
The transformation was breathtaking, what had been a charming and cosmopolitan citizen of the world turned into mindless robot in a millisecond.
Of course, we are so close to ourselves that we don’t even see when it happens to us. But, we most assuredly all have that blind spot when we regurgitate our programming, thinking all along that we are being most reasonable.