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pjeby comments on Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate - Less Wrong
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To be honest, I suspect a lot of those folks, and I include myself here, were anti-collectivists first.
In my own mind, the emotive rule "I might follow, but I must never obey" is built over a long childhood war and an eventual hard-fought and somewhat Pyrrhic victory. I know it's reversed stupidity, but it's hard to let go.
What good rationalist techniques are there for changing such things?
Ask "what's bad about obeying?" Imagine a specific concrete instance of obeying, and then carefully observe your automatic, unconscious response. What bad thing do you expect is going to happen?
Most likely, you will get a response that says something about who you are as a person: your social image, like, "then I'll be weak". You can then ask how you learned that obeying makes someone weak... which may be an experience like your peers teasing you (or someone else) for obeying. You can then rationally examine that experience and determine whether you still think you have valid evidence for reaching that conclusion about obedience.
Please note, however, that you cannot kill an emotional decision like this without actually examining your own evidence for the proposition, as well as against it. The mere knowledge that your rule is irrational is not sufficient to modify it. You need to access (and re-assess) the actual memor(ies) the rule is based on.