Human beings have ways of thinking that are generational and learned. There is nothing in and of itself either inherently mistaken or dangerous about this fact. Where the danger comes in is with the more animal approach to survival which is less about thought and more about one’s presence in the world of nature. The ideas of ‘being right’ and the corollary idea of ‘cannot be wrong’ when mixed with the teaching that one imbibes before one can think and becomes the way one thinks, lead to bigotry and slaughter.
We’ve been here many times, there is nothing original in any of those thoughts or critique. Except for the bizarre and rather strange notion that people love being right. They enjoy thinking of themselves as superior and in a twist of irony, they show themselves up by what they consider to be inferior. Why some people should be afraid of education baffled me for years until I understood what educated people do to harm people’s lives. Sex is also a minefield because for some strange reason people have to have a judgment about who others take to bed.
And there’s the point. All this is about controlling one’s environment. Conformity means control, lack of diversity doesn’t mean lack of original thought, but commonality. What this kind of reaction is in fact, is a way of keeping the cave clean and in a frightening world, narrowing one’s thoughts to those that are manageable during a short lifetime.
Uncertainty is the glory of knowledge.