I would suggest a new concept today. Well, kind of. Kind of an addition to an old idea, too.
Imagine what happens when you say something to someone else. If they’re paying attention, they remember what you said, and those words and ideas are, in a sense, absorbed into them. After that, all their actions after that, everything they do and say, is influenced, to some degree (however potentially incredibly small) by what they heard. And everything they say to other people becomes part of them, not only propagating their own ideas, but the influence your ideas had upon their ideas.
Thusly, everything you do and say can potentially, over time, influence any and every other person in the human species, to some degree. Ideas don’t just get propagated consciously, but eventually become subliminated to some degree in the behavior of many more individuals, perhaps to emerge without prompting, or even without the understanding of the person taking the action.
This produces a massively intricate system of human thoughts and behaviors, kind of like a cognitive ecosystem. Unlike most ecosystems, however, this one is entirely artificial, created by people, for people. Yet, in many ways, it behaves similarly.
A natural ecosystem is a robust thing, able to absorb and adapt to radical changes, though individual parts of the ecosystem may disintegrate. The components of ecosystems, however, grow more delicate the more complex your ecosystem gets. And ecosystems tend to be changed slowly, but respond to sufficient change quickly – changes will build up towards a critical mass which will start a chain reaction that, when the criteria are met, will flash through the ecosystem.
Our mental ecosystem behaves similarly in all these ways, right down to the fascinating similarities involving punctuated equilibrium phenomena. And this is an important part, as it implies that for something really big to happen in our society, it has to sufficiently suffuse itself among us, a process that basically requires us to talk with each other about it a lot, until eventually, one day, when we try to talk about it, we find that we all already agree with each other – and from there, we do something about it, all at once.
So, what does all this mean, you ask. It means that, if our minds, our culture, is like an ecosystem, then we desperately need some way to control pollution. And that control has to come from us as individuals.
It means that you should think about every word you say.
And to do that, it means you need to understand every word you say. If you’re about to say something, you need to ask yourself, “Do I know this is true, or is it just something I heard but never thought about? How do I know it’s true? What does it mean if it’s true?”
If you don’t know something is true, then don’t say it – or at least, make clear that you don’t know if it’s true. Always be able to answer the question, “But how do you know that?”, and always be willing to ask it to others.
The same applies to everything you do, too. “What’s the reason I do this? Do I know it’s a good reason? How do I know it’s a good reason?”
If you don’t have a good reason to do something, then don’t do it – or at least, do it with the understanding that you might not be doing the right thing. Always be able to answer the question, “Why do you act like that?” and always be willing to ask it to others.
It also means that we might not see the impact of what we’re doing – at least, not immediately. But thoughts and actions build up inertia, until eventually they burst, all of a sudden, into very real and very visible effects.
Indon's Redoubt 
I Despise Unrealistic, Nostalgic Romanticisation of the Past
October 22, 2009So, since this guy was smart enough to turn off comments from people who might disagree with his wistful but not particularly factual diatribe about American history, I’m going to make this post a comment in response to it.
I see one person waxing nostalgic about their youth, creatively equating their actions with those of a select few a couple hundred years ago, and acting like this form of behavior is one that was somehow thriving and is now dying.
This article reads like one of a million articles discussing the Moral Decay Of The Youth During This Generation – and it’s not even good with the details.
Americans weren’t fighting for individual freedom – they were fighting for the ability to represent themselves in government. That’s what “Taxation without representation” was about, our original demand of England was for us to receive representation in Parliament as citizens of England, so we could have a say in our government. Not “My” government – “Our” government. Not individual freedom, but our self-determination as a people. Yes, there’s a difference. Yes, it’s important.
Nor was our government forged from ‘understanding of human nature’ any more than it is today (and what understanding we had then, wasn’t as good as what we have now anyway). Our government was created, in fact, from countless minor compromises and ideological conflicts of every type, some with unspoken underlying issues associated with them, and all of this parallel to some individuals seeking their own personal profit and using the events of the times as a vehicle to obtain it. Meanwhile, the people got preached at by the aristocracy controlling the flow of information, mostly following their lead, and being smacked down when they deviated – the proportion may be different, but the parts of our government are all the same today.
Furthermore, ‘our founders’ were not remotely some holistic monolith of thought and beliefs fundamentally distinct from what exists today. In fact, they almost immediately polarized into two camps, one of which advocated strong centralized government (the Federalists, who were vaguely similar to liberals today), and the other of which advocated weaker decentralized government (the Democratic-Republicans, which we could compare to conservatives today). Some didn’t like slavery, and others thought the Bible advocated it.
Finally, the founders were not all religious, just like they didn’t all believe the same ‘holistic’ junk. Thomas Jefferson even wrote an entire gospel which explicitly excluded all miracles, bucking the fundaments of even the modern Christian faith and effectively creating a philosophical, rather than theistic, Christian text.
Our nation’s founders were people, just like us. They bickered and argued and got into physical fights with each other, and some of them sure as hell did profiteer from the War of Independence (most notably, through smuggling). One wanted the Turkey to be our national bird. One was so incredibly popular, he was literally asked to be our King (Washington, if you’re curious).
When people romanticize these people and try to wax philosophical about how much better “things were back then”, they’re ignoring the reality of those times, and more importantly, they’re ignoring the reality of the present. America is little different in its’ fundament than it was two hundred years ago, with one big exception: Businesses are more powerful than the government is now, so they run the government. There are two ways to fix it, and one involves making the government really powerful, and the other involves destroying some businesses.
Most importantly, even back during the Enlightenment, ignorant blowhards were complaining about how social progress was Destroying All That Was Good. They, most of all, have not changed.
Tags:Commentary, Founding Fathers, Moral Decay Of The Youth, People Who Do Not Know What They Are Talking About Trying To Sell Books To Make Easy Money, Peter Breggin, Rant
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