Contrarian

Many people call themselves "free thinkers" but are actually contrarians who define most of their positions in opposition to a perceived enemy rather than their own reasoning or evidence.
"Inside every cynical person is a disappointed idealist." -George Carlin
Trolls are the classic contrarians, and their influence on social media and Internet culture has infected a significant amount of normal discourse. Atheists are contrarians when it comes to religion. Much of the right wing internet is contrarian because it exists as a critique of liberalism rather than the promotion of any positive alternate ideology. Leftist contrarians are known as "Tankies."
Understanding how much people's political positions pivot whenever a mistrusted institution or authority figure makes a claim will help you understand their mentality much more than any rational or ideological interpretation.
Contrarian Democracy
While references to contrarianism in this wiki do not refer to Peter Thiel's investment strategy, there is significant overlap between those who employ it as investors, libercontrarians who believe selfishness is altruism, the right-wing manosphere that thinks misogyny is sexy, propaganda and misinformation intended to deceive, and trolls who just do it to mess with people before eventually becoming the very thing they originally sought to mock. All of these groups share a fundamental mistrust in institutions and the liberal democratic world order, and reflexively reject any ideas they associate with it.
The result of this coalition of cooperating contrarians is that a platform based on the destruction of democratic institutions is able to gain majority support. If enacted, it will undo decades of social progress, and open the door to all kinds of corruption and calamity that those institutions were created to prevent. If the balance of power is significantly disrupted, it can create a feedback loop of authoritarian power consolidation that will be difficult to break.
Contrarian Public Health
Contrarianism is also having a huge impact on public health. The loss of trust isn't wholly unjustified, since there have been so many cases of FDA regulatory capture by the pharmaceutical industry, private health systems that prioritize profits over patients, and a media that puts ratings and sponsorships over consistent, evidence-based advice. However, that is really not a good reason to question vaccines, which are one of the few places that affordable one-time cures are actually produced. Expensive long-term treatments of the symptoms are much more profitable, and research priorities reflect this.
Our healthcare system tends to overmedicate, but that doesn't mean you should ignore doctors while blindly accepting the advice of anyone who professes a skepticism of "western medicine." Sometimes the regulatory authorities say something is bullshit because it really is, not because they are in a conspiracy to suppress the herbal cure for cancer in order to maintain their profits.
Universal health care is the cure for this, because it separates medicine from the profit motive, removing a huge number of perverse incentives. Contrarian misplaced skepticism has unfortunately affected too many people to make this politically viable in the US.
Horseshoe Contrarianism

Horseshoe theory attempts to explain why those on the far-left of the political spectrum often share views with the far-right. Many left-wing podcasters and activists have joined the alt-right in recent years, and not all of them were receiving funds from Russia to do so. [1][2][3]
Contrarianism is the best explanation for horseshoe theory. The common thread between the far-left and far-right extremes is distrust of the institutions of society, and the belief that they are broken beyond repair. Therefore, they are willing to support any sufficiently revolutionary movement that seeks to destroy those institutions, prioritizing this over any other motives or ideologies. This has been described as "Brokenism." [4][5][6]
Double Negative Contrarianism
The contrarian mindset is like an inverter logic gate. When the brain sees enough examples of institutional corruption that the concept becomes generalized, a switch is flipped and a new rule is adopted: "Everything the out-group does is wrong." The self-satisfied brain is happy about all the time it will save not thinking now.
Inevitably, there will be many instances where this lack of reasoning conflicts with reality. It seems unlikely that addressing the underlying lack of critical thinking will be effective, but can enough counter-examples lead to double-contrarianism? When contrarian logic fails again and again, can it lead to an anti-contrarianism where the popular contrarian perspective becomes the antithesis view?
It seems much more likely that this will be how the current contrarian zeitgeist will be resolved. Cognitive complexity will not be increased, simply reversed once again as people realize the folly of contrarianism and exchange it for marginally better anti-contrarianism. It's as good as we can hope for without significant improvements in education.
Devil Advocacy
While playing the devil's advocate can be useful for examining the other side's perspective in a debate, it is common for contrarians to do it in a way that seems more like trolling, or just taking the devil's side. The one can become the other if not careful. While some amount is necessary for making steel man arguments, moderation in devil advocacy is recommended to avoid being annoying or accidentally advancing the devil's agenda.
Godwin's Law of Contrarianism
Godwin's Law states that any sufficiently long online discussion will eventually lead to Hitler comparisons. A corollary of this rule is that any sufficiently contrarian position will eventually lead to fascism and Hitler apologetics. Support for Hitler is the final frontier of contrarianism. If the mainstream is wrong about everything, they must be wrong about Hitler, too. Therefore, Hitler wasn't the most evil person ever to live, in fact he had some pretty good ideas.
Fascism is reactionary and should be understood as a contrarian reaction to a corrupt system where too many bad actors have eroded trust in institutions, leading people to reject both truth and falsehood alike, so long as it comes from their perceived out-group. Trying to identify motives based on internal goals and ideologies is impossible, because they are defined only by what they oppose.
Opportunistic Contrarianism
Grifters often encourage people to turn their skepticism into contrarianism. Since the government is the main institution that we have that can prevent and punish grift, grifters have a vested interest in undermining our faith and trust in it.
The contrarian is the ultimate mark. They are incredibly predictable, easily manipulated, and have already bypassed their rational faculties. Just tell the contrarian that your snake oil is banned by the FDA and they see it as a selling point instead of a red flag. It's too easy!
Do not be tempted to make easy money this way. While many contrarians are assholes, it is still unethical to take advantage of them. If enough people do it, you end up with fascism, and that sucks for everyone.
The Antichrist and Contrarian Christianity
When you go full contrarian, the world turns upside-down. You have been convinced that everything you've ever been told is lies, and the only path to truth is to assume the opposite. How would that impact your vision of the ideal moral human, or Christ? That ideal would be turned upside-down as well. It would become Anti-Christ.

Contrarians will worship the Antichrist because it embodies the opposite of the values we have been told to uphold. In the contrarian mind, this actually makes more sense. They are so vigilant for the "wolf in sheep's clothing" that they eagerly embrace the naked wolf because of it's honesty. Anyone who claims to have good intentions is suspect, so the only person you can trust is the one with no pretenses.
Capitalism, specifically the libertarian, objectivist interpretation of it that emphasizes the "greed is good" mantra of the 1980s, is the bad seed that has created the generating equation of modern Christian contrarianism. The fact that capitalism is able to put our greed to productive use does not mean that greed itself should be celebrated. This fundamental mistake turns the altruistic instinct on its head, where helping becomes hurting and giving becomes taking. The result is a political philosophy where any direct action to embody the values of Jesus (helping the poor, healing the sick) are opposed based on the logic that these will ultimately do more harm than good. If we take that money and invest it, the poor and the sick can get jobs, and they will be better helped in the long run than if we help them directly. We'll just ignore the possibility that someone may be too sick or poverty-stricken to be hirable.
The proverb "give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" has contributed significantly to this contrarian concept. Many people use this saying as if it was from scripture, rather than the 1885 novel Mrs. Dymond. Jesus never said that shit. Jesus gave people fish.
From this bad seed is sowed a politics of pure greed and ambition, where the wants of the rich outweigh the needs of the poor, and any attempt to use the wealth of the nation to fulfill the message of Jesus is opposed. This is not Christ, it is Antichrist. Literally!
Beyond selfish anti-tax sentiments, the contrarian sees virtue in all of the faults of the Antichrist. By not pretending to tell the truth, their lies are seen as honesty. By not pretending to be faithful, their lack of loyalty and ethics is seen as strength and conviction. The contrarian Christ will naturally embody the opposite of everything we were told Jesus stood for. Pointing out the contradiction only reinforces the contrarian's belief in the Antichrist.
The Antichrist is not a bad person who pretends to be good. They are a person who says bad is good. The Antichrist is a contrarian, and all contrarian Christians are following the Antichrist.
It seems possible that the biblical Antichrist was borne of a keen intuitive understanding of the nature of contrarianism, and the possibility that a leader will use their contrarian authority to the ruin of all. Ancient people had to be familiar with breakdowns of institutional trust, and the false prophets that profit on it. This is hardly the first time it has happened.
Extreme Contrarianism
The most devoted contrarians will look for the broadest possible consensus positions and take the opposite stance. Such extreme contrarianism was rare in the pre-Internet days when it was impossible to build any community around them. If you were a Flat Earther, you were probably the only one you'd ever know. The communities that form around extreme contrarian ideas use in-group dynamics to reinforce these beliefs that suggest the entire rest of the world has gotten it wrong.
Conspiracy theories are extreme contrarianism that has gone mainstream, with a significant percentage of conservatives expressing QAnon-based beliefs.
Creationism is a form of extreme contrarianism, where disagreeing with the scientific consensus on evolution makes you seem pious to your fellow fundamentalists.
Then you have pop-culture contrarians like Brian Griffin who just love to criticize anything that is widely liked.
The Monty Python skit "Argument Clinic" provides a great comedy example of what happens when you want to have a debate, but end up talking to a contrarian.
A lot of commenters mention contrarianism in their analysis of modern politics, but not a ton of content creators address this issue directly in long form. Here's one that gives a good breakdown of the difference between contrarianism and critical thinking. It also uses the Monty Python skit as an example, but rest assured it is a different video even if YouTube generated a similar thumbnail for both.
The man in this song is taking the contrarian position that she will not be able to do those things better. A critical thinker would have responded "it depends" and evaluated their relative skill at each suggested task. The woman in this song is being overconfident, but not contrarian.
In this example, we see two people who have contrary perspectives on most things. However, MC Scat Cat would only be a "contrarian" if his divergent preferences were formed as a reaction to Paula Abdul's, rather than him coming into the relationship as a self-actualized feline with his own convictions. Contrarianism that develops over the course of a relationship is a common phenomenon, but more often leads to divorce than genre-defining cartoon duets.