The critical thinking you rightly advocate for is something a lot of people are purposefully avoiding. Ideology intoxicating because it does your thinking for you. Having to know about a variety of topics and formulate opinions and weigh issues on their merits is anxiety inducing for many. It’s so much easier to just join a team, be assigned your opinions and move on from there secure in the knowledge that as long as you demonstrate your loyalty to the team you will have a place in the group. Whether the group is right about any given thing is of no difference to a person just needing to belong somewhere. Many will take that comfort over principled thought and the risk of finding yourself on the “wrong” side of an issue or group.
Perhaps in this unmoored era the sense of belonging people need overrides everything else. There is so little now to belong to they seize anything. The people I saw on the videos often did not seem like bad people. They had just temporarily joined a tribe.
Well put! In my extended family, this aversion to rational debate has been a distinctly generational shift. My mother told of raucous arguments in her Irish immigrant, railroad and factory worker, staunch union family. Much shouting and pounding of tables which she found thrilling and fascinating as a child, when she was permitted to listen. We always argued ideas for sport. Games were for children. The Millennial generation after me wants nothing to do with debate and considers any argument bad manners. It's all small talk and boring games now at gatherings. I hate it, but I am sympathetic since they've been under the harsh spotlight of social media most of their lives, where the slightest error in opinion is social death. They're just as smart, but they've adapted to a new rigid conformity that makes the '50s seem free wheeling. If they argue at all, it is with stangers online (as I am doing.) Our only freedom is in anonymity now, which is antithetical to social bonding. Quite a quandary.
That is a good point. Our freedom comes from anonymity, which is not conducive to forming bonds. In fact it runs the risk of unhealthy bonds, like parasocial relationships.
Respectfully Spiff, freedom is a conceptual ideal which isn’t located downstream from anon or pseudo anonymity...
Comfortability of free expression on line in todays political environment may be limited to the platforms providing privacy protections like pseudoanon or better.
I agree that narrative has become toxic in many ways in our culture.
I think, though, that the problem is more basic. People are very prone to preferring narrative/story and, if available, visual presentation, to text. I mean in terms of the masses of people, the average person. In long history, text was reserved to elites, and most people got their knowledge by oral teaching, often in the form of narrative, and trusted speakers. Hence the emphasis was on narrative and the status of the narrative provider. That's much of history, below the literate elite class.
That changes with the printing press, and of course that created an era in which ideas, which are more abstract and are more readily expressed and analyzed in text, rose to prominence. That rise led, in turn, to a kind of supplanting of narrative and personal presentation of narrative by text, although this was never full or complete below the elite literate class -- nevertheless it was largely the case. Even 70 years ago, the average person, including average working class low education person, read newspapers daily, often read books for leisure and so on. That begins to change with the rise of TV, and then the internet and smartphone, and the ability of everyone to "create content" and "consume content" moves things back to a place that, while new and based on a new technology, nevertheless hearkens back to the prior era where the masses of people relied on narratives and their trust of the speaker to develop their framework for coming to grips with reality, and not wrestling with ideas or critical thinking by means of a text.
This is a problem for the reasons you cite here, and many other ones. In many ways, it's a massive step *backwards*, away from critical thinking, and back towards stories (which are oversimplifications) that tend to try to sway people based on things other than critical thinking (emotion, identification with a person's experience and so on), and which are chosen based on one's assessment of the reliability of the purveyor of the narrative -- a judgment which, in our polarized age, tends to be highly tribal. And so we have the re-emergence of a narrative-based epistemic framework, and one that prizes tribal alignments for purposes of vetting the reliability of the narrator, and you end up with ... disaster. Critical thinking is backseated, emotional resonance and personal identification are front-seated, and the whole situation appears, when you step back from it, quite atavistic.
I am not sure what we can do about this, though, because it appears from where I am sitting at least that the masses of people prefer narrative, and prefer personal identification with the identity of the narrator as the vetting screen than they do critical thinking and working with text. It's a big problem, but it also seems to be deeply seated in human nature, for most people outside of the most textually literate set.
You raise some great points. You may be correct. It is critical thinking and text-based analysis that is the anomaly here. The norm throughout history is illiteracy except for an elite, often a clergy.
People don't naturally retain words either. This is why hymns were used in Christianity. It was noted illiterates retained more information if they could sing it, hence why kids take to nursery rhymes before they can read. I am struck some of the chanting at the Palestine demos was in this vein. Easy to sing and remember, but with no understanding of the meaning or context.
I don't know if you have read Neil Postman's book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. It is about the effects of TV, but very relevant to today. Worth checking as he covers many of your points.
It's hard not to be knee-jerk-reactive to things like tearing down posters of missing children due to "latest-group-think" but in this case I think it's appropriate: these people deserve scorn and most certainly no benefit of doubt!
My own feelings on this are that the group-think model of "lets embrace the latest MSM thing" is a form of mental illness. It's a form of retardation in my (non medical opinion).
I used to question if people really were "stupid" enough to believe the propaganda spewed by the BBC and others and I no longer do. I also don't believe "intelligence", in the traditional sense, is a factor: seemingly intelligent people fall for this $hit all the time - An easy reminder is the Ukraine flags hanging out windows all over the place!
Not sure what the solution is (well, I am, but I can't print it here!) but I thought I'd shake my fist at the clouds in support :)
A villain is central to many cozy narratives about “what’s wrong with the world.” In its most cogent forms, it’s what we mean by ideology. It’s the unquestioned basis of my understanding. Most human beings strongly resist self-inquiry. We correctly intuit that we may become unmoored from what we take as consistent, knowable, and immutable. That mind-blowing question is the gateway to philosophy, where angels fear to tread.
But a villain is a godsend. (Who’s a better villain than “The Jews”?) Everything falls into place, because we have explained the negative that haunts us. If a question looms on the horizon, threatening to cast doubt on our project, it is the messenger’s fault. The messenger, too, must be slain. That is the gateway to autocracy and fascism. The Other is the Enemy of Reality, and must be extinguished. It’s a poor, shabby sort of belief, yet deeply comforting, especially when we find our fellows marching in step, and we can join the family in a rush of mob activism.
It's pretty clear to me now that debate as we used to know it is dead. There's simply too much emotional baggage / friction involved in changing one's mind. I'm beginning to think that all we can do is plant a seed of doubt in the narrative and hope that time and the pressures of reality do the rest.
What if all our inherited "religious" narratives are false and very much past their useful use by date. And that they are now waging global warfare to gain control over all human beings.
The narrative based on the lie that the Jews are the chosen people and that their "God" promised them exclusive ownership and control over all of the ancient Biblical lands.
The narrative based on the lie that Islam is the final divine revelation, and that is thus binding on all human beings
The narrative based on the presumed bodily "resurrection" of Jesus which of course did not and could not happen. And that one is "saved" and one's body will be "resurrected' when Jesus comes again.
The narrative based on the bogus "great commission" to convert all beings to the "one-true-way" as defined by the "catholic" church and/or that "salvation" is only possible within the "catholic" church, and that the grotesque "catholic" magisterium is binding on all human beings.
Perhaps. But it seems to me that all of the actors involved in this deadly psycho-drama are at many levels being controlled and driven by powerful invisible psychic/energetic force fields each of which has its almost unstoppable moment.
This pretty much reflects my own feelings. I have empathy for the victims on both sides. And yet we are expected to "take sides". Well, I pretty much condemn anyone who hurts innocents, no matter in what cause. Are we allowed to criticize both Gaza and Israel? Apparently not.
These things become tribal. Even less tolerated is the notion they have been fighting for a long time. Neither side will ever give in, so it will be a war of attrition.
It's been years since I read the Bible; but in one of the two "creation stories" (where God creates Adam), it is implied (if not stated) that man would be a little lower than the angels. As George Carlin sagely commented, many people believe in angels, but few admit believing in goblins.
Well, God created man in his "image", a spiritual creature, and he has been buffeted back and forth by his good angel and bad angel from day one.
Right now, mass hysteria has taken control of the world. And Satan laughs.
great point. we can write and talk all day about the Woke Mind Virus, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Covidians, BLM riots, Loving the Current Thing etc and plenty of people have.
but to sum it up as simply as we can could be thus: Emotions over Thought.
pure marketing and public relations strategy. when they grab U by the emotions, yer mind will be dragged along behind, forced to download the easiest rationale available.
my favorite example of this is every person who cries Fascist is unable to define what the word actually means. (I think they believe it means a really bad person).
I think the whole episode was very telling, for both sides. The assumptions by one group and the outrage of another, all over foreign nationals. All driven by multiculturalism.
Yes I am aware that reason, logic, the enlightenment and anything else we consider crucial to civilization is now classed as white, imperialist, colonizing etc.
It is difficult to understand how anyone can believe these things at times.
European cultures seem to have about 20-30 percent prone to some form of suicidal altruism. Whether it is ethnomasochism or simply naively assuming the third world hordes will adapt to become like us, they cannot accept what has clearly worked in the past.
It is associated with midwittery too, so academia, the media and other professions that contain influential people can dominate since that is where many of them end up.
That combination of liberal ideas plus reach or influence seems to be lethal. The only cure is reality, which is heading for the midwits as we speak.
I am not sure it is a predatory group so much as plain old decadence. Or even more simple, the wrong people are steering society.
As for IQ. It think it is correlated positively because the nonsense we see around us requires imagination, which relies on intelligence. You have to imagine a climate catastrophe that is clearly not happening. You have to imagine systemic racism since no evidence exists. You have to imagine men subconsciously oppress women because all the evidence suggests it is women who have the upper hand.
These are all mental models, or narrative frameworks if you prefer. The midwits have just enough IQ to understand them but not enough to dismantle them. Those that do have the brains for this either do dismantle the narratives or they find them emotionally satisfying so they embrace them e.g. they support housing refugees and condemn critics as racists.
The critical thinking you rightly advocate for is something a lot of people are purposefully avoiding. Ideology intoxicating because it does your thinking for you. Having to know about a variety of topics and formulate opinions and weigh issues on their merits is anxiety inducing for many. It’s so much easier to just join a team, be assigned your opinions and move on from there secure in the knowledge that as long as you demonstrate your loyalty to the team you will have a place in the group. Whether the group is right about any given thing is of no difference to a person just needing to belong somewhere. Many will take that comfort over principled thought and the risk of finding yourself on the “wrong” side of an issue or group.
Perhaps in this unmoored era the sense of belonging people need overrides everything else. There is so little now to belong to they seize anything. The people I saw on the videos often did not seem like bad people. They had just temporarily joined a tribe.
That said, it is a worry.
Well put! In my extended family, this aversion to rational debate has been a distinctly generational shift. My mother told of raucous arguments in her Irish immigrant, railroad and factory worker, staunch union family. Much shouting and pounding of tables which she found thrilling and fascinating as a child, when she was permitted to listen. We always argued ideas for sport. Games were for children. The Millennial generation after me wants nothing to do with debate and considers any argument bad manners. It's all small talk and boring games now at gatherings. I hate it, but I am sympathetic since they've been under the harsh spotlight of social media most of their lives, where the slightest error in opinion is social death. They're just as smart, but they've adapted to a new rigid conformity that makes the '50s seem free wheeling. If they argue at all, it is with stangers online (as I am doing.) Our only freedom is in anonymity now, which is antithetical to social bonding. Quite a quandary.
That is a good point. Our freedom comes from anonymity, which is not conducive to forming bonds. In fact it runs the risk of unhealthy bonds, like parasocial relationships.
Respectfully Spiff, freedom is a conceptual ideal which isn’t located downstream from anon or pseudo anonymity...
Comfortability of free expression on line in todays political environment may be limited to the platforms providing privacy protections like pseudoanon or better.
I agree it is not freedom. But anonymity is freeing in this climate.
I agree that narrative has become toxic in many ways in our culture.
I think, though, that the problem is more basic. People are very prone to preferring narrative/story and, if available, visual presentation, to text. I mean in terms of the masses of people, the average person. In long history, text was reserved to elites, and most people got their knowledge by oral teaching, often in the form of narrative, and trusted speakers. Hence the emphasis was on narrative and the status of the narrative provider. That's much of history, below the literate elite class.
That changes with the printing press, and of course that created an era in which ideas, which are more abstract and are more readily expressed and analyzed in text, rose to prominence. That rise led, in turn, to a kind of supplanting of narrative and personal presentation of narrative by text, although this was never full or complete below the elite literate class -- nevertheless it was largely the case. Even 70 years ago, the average person, including average working class low education person, read newspapers daily, often read books for leisure and so on. That begins to change with the rise of TV, and then the internet and smartphone, and the ability of everyone to "create content" and "consume content" moves things back to a place that, while new and based on a new technology, nevertheless hearkens back to the prior era where the masses of people relied on narratives and their trust of the speaker to develop their framework for coming to grips with reality, and not wrestling with ideas or critical thinking by means of a text.
This is a problem for the reasons you cite here, and many other ones. In many ways, it's a massive step *backwards*, away from critical thinking, and back towards stories (which are oversimplifications) that tend to try to sway people based on things other than critical thinking (emotion, identification with a person's experience and so on), and which are chosen based on one's assessment of the reliability of the purveyor of the narrative -- a judgment which, in our polarized age, tends to be highly tribal. And so we have the re-emergence of a narrative-based epistemic framework, and one that prizes tribal alignments for purposes of vetting the reliability of the narrator, and you end up with ... disaster. Critical thinking is backseated, emotional resonance and personal identification are front-seated, and the whole situation appears, when you step back from it, quite atavistic.
I am not sure what we can do about this, though, because it appears from where I am sitting at least that the masses of people prefer narrative, and prefer personal identification with the identity of the narrator as the vetting screen than they do critical thinking and working with text. It's a big problem, but it also seems to be deeply seated in human nature, for most people outside of the most textually literate set.
You raise some great points. You may be correct. It is critical thinking and text-based analysis that is the anomaly here. The norm throughout history is illiteracy except for an elite, often a clergy.
People don't naturally retain words either. This is why hymns were used in Christianity. It was noted illiterates retained more information if they could sing it, hence why kids take to nursery rhymes before they can read. I am struck some of the chanting at the Palestine demos was in this vein. Easy to sing and remember, but with no understanding of the meaning or context.
I don't know if you have read Neil Postman's book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. It is about the effects of TV, but very relevant to today. Worth checking as he covers many of your points.
People prefer their narrative in bumper-sticker-sized bites.
It's hard not to be knee-jerk-reactive to things like tearing down posters of missing children due to "latest-group-think" but in this case I think it's appropriate: these people deserve scorn and most certainly no benefit of doubt!
My own feelings on this are that the group-think model of "lets embrace the latest MSM thing" is a form of mental illness. It's a form of retardation in my (non medical opinion).
I used to question if people really were "stupid" enough to believe the propaganda spewed by the BBC and others and I no longer do. I also don't believe "intelligence", in the traditional sense, is a factor: seemingly intelligent people fall for this $hit all the time - An easy reminder is the Ukraine flags hanging out windows all over the place!
Not sure what the solution is (well, I am, but I can't print it here!) but I thought I'd shake my fist at the clouds in support :)
I definitely think character or personality is the factor, not IQ. Plenty of bright people automatically supported Ukraine and mandated vaxxing etc.
A villain is central to many cozy narratives about “what’s wrong with the world.” In its most cogent forms, it’s what we mean by ideology. It’s the unquestioned basis of my understanding. Most human beings strongly resist self-inquiry. We correctly intuit that we may become unmoored from what we take as consistent, knowable, and immutable. That mind-blowing question is the gateway to philosophy, where angels fear to tread.
But a villain is a godsend. (Who’s a better villain than “The Jews”?) Everything falls into place, because we have explained the negative that haunts us. If a question looms on the horizon, threatening to cast doubt on our project, it is the messenger’s fault. The messenger, too, must be slain. That is the gateway to autocracy and fascism. The Other is the Enemy of Reality, and must be extinguished. It’s a poor, shabby sort of belief, yet deeply comforting, especially when we find our fellows marching in step, and we can join the family in a rush of mob activism.
It's pretty clear to me now that debate as we used to know it is dead. There's simply too much emotional baggage / friction involved in changing one's mind. I'm beginning to think that all we can do is plant a seed of doubt in the narrative and hope that time and the pressures of reality do the rest.
Or a dose of reality. I think we have too may emotional thinkers to debate rationally.
What if all our inherited "religious" narratives are false and very much past their useful use by date. And that they are now waging global warfare to gain control over all human beings.
The narrative based on the lie that the Jews are the chosen people and that their "God" promised them exclusive ownership and control over all of the ancient Biblical lands.
The narrative based on the lie that Islam is the final divine revelation, and that is thus binding on all human beings
The narrative based on the presumed bodily "resurrection" of Jesus which of course did not and could not happen. And that one is "saved" and one's body will be "resurrected' when Jesus comes again.
The narrative based on the bogus "great commission" to convert all beings to the "one-true-way" as defined by the "catholic" church and/or that "salvation" is only possible within the "catholic" church, and that the grotesque "catholic" magisterium is binding on all human beings.
I think they are false, and so do many others. These things are just motivations for the actors involved.
Perhaps. But it seems to me that all of the actors involved in this deadly psycho-drama are at many levels being controlled and driven by powerful invisible psychic/energetic force fields each of which has its almost unstoppable moment.
This pretty much reflects my own feelings. I have empathy for the victims on both sides. And yet we are expected to "take sides". Well, I pretty much condemn anyone who hurts innocents, no matter in what cause. Are we allowed to criticize both Gaza and Israel? Apparently not.
These things become tribal. Even less tolerated is the notion they have been fighting for a long time. Neither side will ever give in, so it will be a war of attrition.
It's been years since I read the Bible; but in one of the two "creation stories" (where God creates Adam), it is implied (if not stated) that man would be a little lower than the angels. As George Carlin sagely commented, many people believe in angels, but few admit believing in goblins.
Well, God created man in his "image", a spiritual creature, and he has been buffeted back and forth by his good angel and bad angel from day one.
Right now, mass hysteria has taken control of the world. And Satan laughs.
great point. we can write and talk all day about the Woke Mind Virus, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Covidians, BLM riots, Loving the Current Thing etc and plenty of people have.
but to sum it up as simply as we can could be thus: Emotions over Thought.
pure marketing and public relations strategy. when they grab U by the emotions, yer mind will be dragged along behind, forced to download the easiest rationale available.
my favorite example of this is every person who cries Fascist is unable to define what the word actually means. (I think they believe it means a really bad person).
Yes I agree. Most use the word fascist or even Nazi to mean a bad person. As you say there is no concept of fascism itself.
Lots of people are quite happy to download some script with minimal analysis.
ok heres a couple of things
israel owns the media, they control the narrative
israel has THOUSANDS of hostages but they use the term prisoners, many are children and many held without charge.
israel are behaving just like the nazis and you all buy their bullcrap, its the most evil ive ever seen in my lifetime
yes emotions run high, when trying to get through to the stupid ones that cant see they are being played
israel knew a year a go about the attack and let it happen so they had the excuse they wanted to commit genocide
Facts don't care about feelings, and feelings don't care about facts!
https://argomend.substack.com/i/137791932/feelings-dont-care-about-your-facts
I think the whole episode was very telling, for both sides. The assumptions by one group and the outrage of another, all over foreign nationals. All driven by multiculturalism.
Yes I am aware that reason, logic, the enlightenment and anything else we consider crucial to civilization is now classed as white, imperialist, colonizing etc.
It is difficult to understand how anyone can believe these things at times.
European cultures seem to have about 20-30 percent prone to some form of suicidal altruism. Whether it is ethnomasochism or simply naively assuming the third world hordes will adapt to become like us, they cannot accept what has clearly worked in the past.
It is associated with midwittery too, so academia, the media and other professions that contain influential people can dominate since that is where many of them end up.
That combination of liberal ideas plus reach or influence seems to be lethal. The only cure is reality, which is heading for the midwits as we speak.
I am not sure it is a predatory group so much as plain old decadence. Or even more simple, the wrong people are steering society.
As for IQ. It think it is correlated positively because the nonsense we see around us requires imagination, which relies on intelligence. You have to imagine a climate catastrophe that is clearly not happening. You have to imagine systemic racism since no evidence exists. You have to imagine men subconsciously oppress women because all the evidence suggests it is women who have the upper hand.
These are all mental models, or narrative frameworks if you prefer. The midwits have just enough IQ to understand them but not enough to dismantle them. Those that do have the brains for this either do dismantle the narratives or they find them emotionally satisfying so they embrace them e.g. they support housing refugees and condemn critics as racists.