It's always down to the people at the individual level. What will they do with it?
Yes and no. Yes, when it comes to personal responsibility, moral or legal. No, when we're faced with an outcome of manipulated crowd behaviour, a mass whos elements have no working conscience, no awareness, no understanding and no will to change it. Instead, they demand that the rest of humanity adjusts to their delusions. It's upon others to save any sanity left and not be swept away to become new pariahs living in underground sewer systems (sorry for the dystopian vision).
Have you noticed that every revolution is in the name of "liberty" or another equally noble idea? There is a great book written by Everett Dean Martin in 1920, "Behavior of Crowds" and its abridged version titled "Mob mind vs civil Liberty". Different times, different struggles and ideologies, but the patterns and psychology remain the same. Here is a quote:
For instance, there is liberty. Every crowd demands it when it is seeking power; no crowd permits it when it is in power. A crowd which is struggling for supremacy is really trying to free itself and as many people as possible from the control of another crowd. Naturally, the struggle for power appears to consciousness as a struggle for liberty as such. (...) We have had occasion to note the intolerance of the crowd-mind as such. A revolutionary crowd, with all its lofty idealism about liberty, is commonly just as intolerant as a reactionary crowd. It must be so in order to remain a crowd. Once it is triumphant it may exert its pressure in a different direction, but the pinch is there just the same. Like its predecessor, it must resort to measures of restraint, possibly even a "reign of terror," in order that the new-won "liberty"—which is to say, its own place at the head of the procession—may be preserved. The denial of freedom appears therefore as its triumph, and for a time people are deceived. They think they are free because everyone is talking about liberty.
Eventually some one makes the discovery that people do not become free just by repeating the magic word "liberty." A disappointed faction of the newly emancipated humanity begins to demand its "rights." The crowd hears its own catchwords quoted against itself. It proceeds to prove that freedom exists by denouncing the disturbers and silencing them, if necessary, by force. The once radical crowd has now become reactionary. Its dream of world emancipation is seen to be a hoax. Lovers of freedom now yoke themselves in a new rebel crowd so that oppressed humanity may be liberated from the liberators. Again, the will to power is clothed in the dream symbols of an emancipated society, and so on around and around the circle, until people learn that with crowds freedom is impossible. For men to attain to mastery of themselves is as abhorrent to one crowd as to another. The crowd merely wants freedom to be a crowd—that is, to set up its own tyranny in the place of that which offends the self-feeling of its members.
We know that it's just one layer, though absolutely real and already bad enough; then there are also agitators, skilled screenwriters and puppet masters behind those crowds with their own nefarious agendas, so that the crowds become their tool and toll.
Take the forum for example. There would be none of this without liberalism. We are free to analyse and criticise religion, even create one of our own. We can associate with people from different cultures. We can even say very bad things about the powers that be. We can criticise the state and the economic system. We even critique the family itself as a source of much trauma and suffering. I don't think we're wrong to do any of those things.
But it's not us who are the problem, that's them. Or so we think, and some others like us.
Of course, evaluations differ depending on one's aim and values, but we are here together because we share both. So now, more seriously, if there was everything wrong/evil about a doctrine, ideology, programme installed, nobody would buy it, don't you think?
The result, as I see it, is like this, simplified to the max: a minority (how big, would be a good question) has bought it, got programmed and causes a lot of problems to others. Another minority has not bought it and is terrified by the direction part of the world is taking. Majority - I think it's still majority - is oblivious to any of these problems and doesn't care any further than the tip of their nose and goes with the flow.
It's the bigger picture that is most disturbing and we're in a process of figuring out if there is a connection between the factors and approaches we are aware of. We want to know which are the best fitting theories/explanations and see the turning points with no return - so that we ourselves can avoid custom-made pitfalls, have a chance to notice a snow ball up there before it becomes an avalanche and swallows us, and finally, be better equipped when - if it ever going to happen - setting up a new and better world.
And as for the bolded sentence, how can you know what this world would be like if there was no liberal ideology invented? Maybe there would be nothing to criticise? Maybe there would be liberty without liberalism, and no need to liberate anyone from liberals? My point is that it is a fat assumption on your part; not that there is no possibility of it being as you said, but it's important to be aware of assumptions been made for the sake of argument. In other words, you quietly assume that liberalism is good and then you follow with what you present as its benefits, the same time listing many things that are not 'good' yet smoothly dismissing them with a wave as if it was self-evident that they have nothing to do with it. But this we don't know.
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