I'm not going to explain exactly why I did this original post, but for anyone who's still coming to what apparently has turned into a lecture series, there was a subtext to my post. If you didn't pick up on it before, maybe my saying there's something behind why I posted this here on a Giant Bomb video game blog should clue you in. If that's still not enough, I guess you're on your own.
Singular, you're right as you said in your personal email to me, your post reads as inflammatory, but I don't think it's because of translation difficulties. You have managed to do what you say I'm doing, which is generalizing someone else. I'm going to assume, because you're human, you've at least heard about people defeating their own prejudices through learning. You seem to be ignoring my point about how that the awareness of human failings itself is important, and how that awareness has the potential to transform one's opinion. Whether or not it does is anyone's guess. Beyond that, I think we're running in circles, like I keep saying.
Eurobum, I think that saying was more an attribution of Einstein's own mental capacity, that he used more of his brain than your average human, again, as you say, to motivate people even though it has no basis in fact.
You brought up a good point about people being manipulated by that same resource that's supposed to help us. A lot of people have been subjected to this recovered memory stuff, despite consistent research showing our memories are fluid and not terribly reliable, especially when not backed up by habit and continued experience. There is still a lot of hysteria going on based on supposed recovered memories. While child abuse is of course a real thing, many of the anecdotal evidence we have for how pervasive it is, how pervasive and evil Satanism is, past lives, the whole shebang is based on faulty methodology, whether or not it was a power trip on the part of the therapist or a well-meaning but flawed attempt to make the person better.
There is something to be said about trauma being able to help someone enact change in their lives, the problem is the ethics of this use of trauma are questionable at best. Often people don't understand the risks of going into a controlled but traumatic experience meant to help the person deal with deeper-set emotions, and this quest for wellness can then often become more damaging than it is helpful.
If you're implying, though, that no framework (as you acerbically use all-caps to emphasize) is useful because they are imperfect, I'm not sure there's much more we can talk about. I think religion works both ways, unfortunately. It does make well-meaning people do stupid stuff, but it also makes people who would otherwise do horrible things stop or think twice. Maybe some day we'll figure out a method to provide social context without the nasty side-effects, but I don't think it's an easy task.
One framework, if you can still stand for me to use that word, I think about is that getting rid of slavery helps people get used to not having it, so more people begin to look at former slaves as human beings. Allowing women to vote, as unpopular as it was for many people at the time, gets people used to the idea that women do it. The banality of evil that everyone talks about also has an analog in the banality of good, that a societal structure, if sensible, can often be the catalyst for the next generation's acceptance of something. Again, there's good and bad there, but I'm not pretending this should all be thrown away because of the shades of gray inherent in any social structure. Thus the vigilance I first talked about in the original post helps fight against any corruption within a framework, no matter how beneficial it might be. The rebelliousness inherent in humanity helps with that, even though our individual rebelliousness against things we don't like can, also, be harmful. This cycles back to the prejudices I talk about, and how sometimes we need to be shown that our inherent prejudices aren't valid.
Put too much of a focus on the individual, and you become isolated, limited to whatever you can see with your own eyes. Everything becomes illusion and sophistry. Put too much of an emphasis on society, and the individuals that make up that society become dysfunctional, crushed under the weight of society's demands. Sometimes the pendulum swings toward one of these extremes, then swings back. Sometimes sacrifices are necessary to help achieve long-term goals, but I hope society never gains a permanent upper hand. Ultimately the individual will be the better of the two, but we need to figure out, in the societal pool, what stuff works and what stuff doesn't.
Science is, of course, the best method for this. The only method, really, as imperfect as it is. And, as you pointed out, even the institutions that build up around the scientific method are themselves often corrupted. That's why we need to build ourselves up, to understand at least the basics of science better so that we aren't dependent upon experts of any stripe to tell us what's best for us. This only comes through education and reinforcement, individual striving and group recognition of science's worth. The latter is, again, a framework.
Finally, I'd like to repeat that there was an ancillary point I was trying to make with this blog post, despite all the interesting directions this conversation has taken us. I'm disappointed no one picked up on it, but I guess it's my fault for not addressing the actual issue more directly. Anyway, thanks for everyone's participation.
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