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China Elevator Stories
Where Do Our Opinions Come From?
Opinions generally fall into two categories: those shaped by personal experience and those acquired from external sources.
03/09/2025
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
There are different kinds of opinions (and certainly different kinds of people). What has been happening in these past few years more than ever in European countries such as Austria or Germany has been the spreading of the belief that opinions can be changed, must be changed, and that tolerant opinions aren’t allowed to stand on their own.
A true opinion is an opinion that is aligned with the truth. It may not be what other people (such as narcissists, who have a severe problem with the truth) want to hear, but it can be tolerant in the sense that it aligns with reality, tolerates the fact that it is just an opinion (not something that “kills” another person by someone thinking it), and simply reflects reality. When I say tolerant, I don’t mean a lie to minimize what is happening, but rather, an opinion that is simply in alignment with the truth.
A true opinion can be that you need to stay away from dangerous people and need to make sure that they leave you alone, such as stalkers or other predators. These aren’t intolerant opinions, though narcissists certainly portray them to be such. They may act completely out of alignment with what would be healthy and natural, and it is not tolerance to have to tolerate the intolerable.
If a stalker stalked you and you now have the opinion that stalkers are bad, well, that’s certainly a normal opinion. But in recent years, any opinion that is in alignment with the truth will be censored, and people who voice their opinions will simply be brainwashed until their brains feel like they have some brain disease.
As a woman who has been harassed daily by malignant narcissists, no matter where you went in Austria, you certainly wouldn’t hold the opinion that nothing’s wrong in Austria. To believe so could be called a brainwashed opinion, but it certainly wouldn’t be an opinion aligned with the truth.
An opinion can come from the inside, or from the outside. An opinion that is formed on the inside of a person cannot be changed. Opinions, in my opinion, can’t be changed easily anyways. If they are changed, then they can only be changed through allowing, not through intimidation, repression, brainwashing, coercion, mind control, or other measures used to change another person.
Opinions that are formed on the inside are those that align with reality because we form them after we have had certain life experiences. They reflect the truth. These opinions are knowledge, and they won’t go away, no matter how often a narcissist attacks us for having these opinions (I have been dealing with a severely mentally ill stalker for years who has tried to constantly make my opinion go away).
If I believe a person is ugly, this opinion also cannot be changed if I already saw what a person looked like. Why pretend everyone’s good looking when that is simply not the truth about people anyways? It doesn’t mean I call everyone ugly, simply that I am aware there are differences in looks. If another person then comes in and constantly tells me they aren’t ugly, well, if I think they aren’t attractive (and I usually won’t call them ugly to their face unless they have attacked me, abused me, verbally abused me, degraded me, called me derogatory names first), then this opinion cannot be changed. I have had this happen with two men who are suffering from erotomania, who constantly try to change my view about them and try to make me “change” into a superficial person who constantly tells them how great and superior they are. Well, why would I? I am not a slave who needs to run after them and tend to their needs, to then praise them and put them on a pedestal and kowtow to them, to be of service anytime they want it. If you don’t have enough self-esteem to accept another person calling you ugly, then you have no place in my life. If you harass a woman constantly and try to grope her, rape her, or otherwise demean her, well, her calling you ugly is just a natural consequence of it to bring to your awareness that you aren’t a match, that she’s not into you, and that you simply don’t make it onto her list of “men who are attractive enough to date.”
Now, certainly looks are just one part of a relationship, but if I want a relationship, I will certainly not look for one with a man who has no self-confidence, claims he is beautiful, attractive, sexy, when in my eyes he is not (but he may be so to others), and I will certainly choose a person who is attractive and good looking to me, since I need to look at that person every day if I am with them. Thus, I won’t date someone who is ugly to me.
Thinking a person is ugly is simply an opinion. It isn’t personal, it’s just what it is. We find some people attractive, others ugly, and others just in the middle, where when we look at them, we aren’t particularly attracted, but also don’t think they are too ugly. Usually, in dating it is common for women to choose to be with a man they find attractive and vice versa.
So in this case, this opinion came from the inside and can’t be changed. A woman looked at you, thought you were ugly (inside her brain) and then chose not to be with you (but you probably were also some kind of mentally ill stalker who made her life a living hell, raped her though you had no right to do so, and harassed her in many other ways, which led to you being called ugly by her, not the other way around, her running around outside and calling strangers ugly).
In my case, I have no problem with tolerant opinions. I had no problem with my grandmother calling my son’s skin “yellow,” and I have no problem with someone thinking I’m ugly. I mean, I am aware of the fact that certain people think I’m a beautiful, attractive woman, and that others think I’m ugly. That’s just their opinion, and if that’s what they think, it’s what they think.
In the case of my grandmother, she was a generally kind and caring person, who helped out a lot, and I had a loving relationship with her. She was generous, she took care of us when our parents were busy with other tasks such as birthing a child, and she was also humble. She was a Type 1, just like me, and she was living an enjoyable but down-to-earth life. She was realistic, and I believe she was a truth teller herself.
That’s why it was never obvious to me that truth tellers aren’t that common in other families, because in my family there were plenty of truth tellers. She wasn’t racist; she was simply not used to Chinese people and probably didn’t have much—or any—contact at all with Chinese people before meeting my ex-husband. My son’s skin may also truly have looked a bit “yellow;” I mean, I don’t know, it certainly didn’t seem “yellow” to me, but I also don’t mind if someone thinks it does.
But such a statement really depends on intent. If her intent wasn’t to hurt, but it was simply an observation, then I don’t care about it at all. I mean, you shouldn’t go around and call Chinese-Austrian people “yellow” in normal daily life, but if a person is over 90 and grew up in times and in an area where Chinese people were rare, and if she wasn’t consciously being racist, as well as if she was usually kind and nice to other people, then I don’t care if she thinks my son’s skin looked “yellow.”
No one’s going to die if a granny says a baby’s skin looks “yellow,” and a baby doesn’t understand this anyway.
As for people who care about looks so much that it’s all they think about all day long, well, I don’t care about looks that much. I mean, why constantly care about looks and not enjoy your life? If we’re simply living our life, we don’t care if someone thinks we’re beautiful or ugly. We may simply think about the beach we’re going to within the next hour with our children, to have a little fun before … Russia drops a nuclear bomb on the world or something. Just kidding (I mean, I hope). But like I said, there are things that are much more important than thinking about looks constantly. I am also much more interested in history, for example, than constantly thinking about my looks. If a person thinks I’m ugly, that’s what they think, and they are entitled to their opinion. So be it. It doesn’t matter to me, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder anyway. A person thinking we’re ugly also doesn’t mean they are good looking or that they have good taste or anything—it simply means they have the opinion that you are ugly. So what! Think whatever you want to think, I don’t care about it anyway.
Why waste your life with meaningless content? If you’re into looks a lot—or too much—you’d be much better off looking at people on Instagram and talking with brainwashed children about how this person looks and how that person looks. Gossip is not something I’m interested in, so look for your peers and leave me alone. (I have been harassed by male stalkers who are making looks way too big a priority in their life and who are trying to do the same to me. These aren’t people who have high self-esteem, they are people who are completely lacking in self-esteem.)
Opinions that come from the outside are often taken on by what are called Mitläufer in German. These are the people who simply conform to a group, who go along with other people’s opinions in groups, who simply take on outside opinions because someone thought these were cool opinions to have. Usually, a person who does so doesn’t have a great sense of self, because if you do, you won’t be influenced by the outside to such an extent.
Truth tellers, by the way, are often people who do not take on outside opinions easily. They may take on some, but certainly won’t take on all of them. That’s why you can trust that they are critical thinkers who constantly question everything, and report on the truth because they have seen it and experienced it firsthand. Truth tellers are the people who don’t conform to outside pressure as easily as others, and who don’t pretend they have opinions they don’t have simply to avoid a narcissist getting angry. They are the people narcissists hate the most, because they see the truth and tell it, even when it is inconvenient, because a narcissist will then make you out to be the problem, punish you, take revenge against you, start a smear campaign against you (and these may last for years, such as in the case of a singer I have written about on my blog, where the smear campaign has already lasted for years, and it started when I told him I didn’t like him, didn’t think anything of him, that he wasn’t as great and talented as he thought he was, and that he certainly wasn’t a person who deserved to be loved by me or for me to put myself in a lower position with regards to him, so he could then play the king of everyone and everything and sabotage my life, simply because of my gender, female, which is a gender he can’t stand. Thus, he attacks women in a relentless way that truly brings a woman to the brink of death, because he has no conscience, no moral code inside of him that tells him when to stop, when something’s inappropriate, when to simply let things be, when a person isn’t a narcissist and doesn’t need to be attacked, etc.).
This person joined incel groups to make himself feel cooler, more powerful, and I was the one who had to bear the brunt of it. He is completely effeminate with regards to women and pushes women into the role of a male, and when a woman resists, he’ll constantly take revenge, punish her for being “female,” and will try to put a mask on her every day, where she now needs to play fake girlfriend who degrades herself with negative words about herself in front of him to show him that he is the king and she is his slave. I mean, if we could censor the correct content on social media—content that is dangerous if it is being spread as information online, such as incels sharing their worldviews and random women then being catcalled, stalked, harassed, raped, groped, called derogatory names all the time, and even killed—well, that would certainly be helpful. But as far as I understand, tolerant content is often censored, while extremist content has now made its way into mainstream (don’t ask me if people always used to be like this, but I feel like people used to be more relaxed, more laid back, didn’t degrade women as much, and that things simply were a bit better in society about 20 years ago. I may be wrong, but this is what I have observed, and while I was sometimes experiencing stalking or harassment 20 years ago, it used to be so extremely rare that I truly wish back the times when I could simply state my opinion, be a woman, be single, be myself, without being constantly attacked).
An outside opinion can be taken on by anyone (if you don’t know that this is the correct opinion, for example), but brainwashed children are more likely to take them on as the truth. They may simply not be discerning enough to understand what the truth is and what it isn’t, and aren’t critical enough thinkers. They tend to run with the crowd, and aren’t children in the real sense of the word, but are those people in a system who easily believe the false narratives of a narcissist, the lies, the gaslighting, the manipulations, and similar stories that, truly, a truth teller wouldn’t believe so easily because they think for themselves.
I have met quite a few brainwashed children, and when they are malignant narcissists, they are truly hard to have to experience, because they simply copy other people’s opinions to then have a puzzle of different opinions (and they may do so because these opinions are currently trendy to have, or because having this opinion will make them part of a group that will make them feel like they are extremely powerful) where the pieces don’t match.
When a person has inside opinions, the pieces match. When a person takes on outside opinions, the pieces do not match.
Have you ever been forced to change your opinion?