Even before anything we learn in life, survival is the most basic function/instinct of the 'human machine': every move we make, even scratching our noses, is in the interest of bodily well-being, and our emotions, or our trainable 'sub-conscious value judgement' system, is the brain's reward or discomfort response to any given situation: without this basic system, we wouldn't be motivated to move or do/think anything at all.
From our very basic, perhaps even hard-wired, emotional responses to everything 'familiar' to us in early life, that is to say things like 'mother', 'milk' and 'warmth', we learn to expand our sphere of acceptance to other 'trusted' useful-for-survival tools shown to us by our also-expanding circle of 'trusted protectors', people usually presented to us by already-accepted trusted protectors. Through this we 're-train' our initial fear response to those people, animals and things unfamiliar to us, and before long in life our brains will have established a library of 'recognised' entities that no longer incite any sense of fear and/or revulsion. Even further on in life, we are able to identify the 'type' of person or thing that our peers and protectors obey/use, and accept those into our sphere of fear-free acceptance and trust as well. To the pre-adolescent, anything that has become part of this sphere is their 'trusted normal',2 and they will still have a fear response (to varying degrees) of anything outside of it.
Here we should also consider how the brain works on a subconscious and conscious level: what we call our 'consciousness' only seems to 'see' a small percentage of what our senses percieve, and the content of the relayed information seems to be dictated by whatever our subconscious deems 'important' to it (or its survival): this 'importance' is dictated by all the '(what is) safe bubble' training described above. Two people in the exact same situation may 'see' different things: if one has developed an affection for, say, a red ball, if they are placed in a warehouse full of jumbled toys, they will 'see' red balls everywhere (and have a positive 'reward' emotional response upon the sight of one), whereas someone else without that experience may not notice them at all. So, not only does our early-life experience determine what and who we trust (and what we fear outside of that), it can even determine how we perceive the world around us.
In 'learning' through the above imitated example and empirical experience, there is rarely (if) any call for us to make a personal assessment of any 'lesson' given3: if the 'trusted' human showing us the example is part of what we 'know', and the result of whatever lesson they give doesn't affect whatever notion of comfort we've developed until then, we have more or less the tendency to simply accept it as 'good' (for our survival). In fact, I would like to propose that, at this stage, the very definition of 'good' and 'bad', outside of physical pain or discomfort, is how familiar whatever being proposed to us is.
Some would like to call our early-life experience 'education', but if what is affecting our internal brain function is the direct result of our environment or outside, imitated-without-question example, programming would be a better descriptive term.
It remains to note that, for humanity, in times where we were still faced with the challenges of nature, nature was just as much, if not more, our education than the examples our protectors set for us: our emotional reactions to all that dangerous (or unfamiliar) to us most likely determined our chances of survival. As humanity began to gather in greater numbers, and thus protect itself from and distance itself from the tests of nature, the dangers in the world around us became less 'real' (almost distant threats, scary tales, really), but the emotional responses that were a defense to these remained quite intact; it's not for nothing that many of us still get a 'thrill' out of horror films and ghost stories still today.
But to not digress, through controlling the environment, clan members, culture, knowledge, and customs of any given settlement, it became possible to 'homogenise' the early-life experience of its younger members, that is to say, impregnate their minds with a 'sameness' with each other, and also impregnate their minds with a fear of all those not 'like' them.
Our around-adolescence 'Switch' to critical thought: a tool no longer needed.
When we come to the point in our lives when the brain gains the ability to discover and analyse (aka 'critical thought'), we suddenly are able to, instead of learning through simple imitation and obedience, question and examine everything we've learned to that point, should those lessons instil emotions of doubt and/or discomfort, and this analysis can even extend to those who were the source of these lessons.1 I think it's important to mention the latter because, from our emergence from nature, our greatest teacher was no longer nature, but other humans.Yet in that time when we lived in competition with creatures of other species, and nature itself, we were often obliged to test those early-life lessons empirically, and, using our critical thought abilities, eliminate, modify and/or improve those found wanting, and this also became essential to our survival. Again (from earlier posts), the Australian aboriginal 'walkabout' is a still-existing 'coming of age' tradition that is a perfect example of this: either the adolescent practically uses/tests all they've learned until then, or the result would almost certainly be death.
But once humans became more sedentary in greater numbers, the 'need' for critical thought waned: agriculture and animal husbandry techniques could be passed down, unchallenged and unchanged, through the generations, and distributed roles in any given settlement meant that a single human was no longer required to learn a full survival skill set. Critical thought seems to have been reserved for those distributing roles and setting the rules, but where 'tradition' became a concept and/or rule, it most likely became possible to propagate knowledge and techniques, through simple example and imitation, through the generations.
Critical Thought and Ambition: 'Blocking The Switch'.
Yet if a lesser-able human wanted to 'rise above' a survive-through-imitation (largely non-critically-thinking) settlement whose hierarchy was dictated by age or ability/strength, they had little choice but to resort to critical thought to dominate non-critical thinkers which was, not without irony, a situation much like, in days before, a human who hoped to emerge victorious from a competition with creatures more agile or stronger than they. And all one had to do is transition to, and develop, critical thought enough to outwit or manipulate those higher up in the feeding chain, or convince/manipulate enough humans to create an army of their own against the same.And once in their desired position, it is obvious that many, if not most, of history's leaders of all calibre saw that a maintained state of non-critically-thinking, childlike survival-dependance mental in an adult population would create a faithful, dependant, unquestioning, conformist, thus controllable, following. The most useful tool to this end was transposing the child's protector-dependant 'rule-based' (or punishment) environment onto an adult population, thus convincing any child in that society that that childhood state was perpetual, or in other words, convincing them that there was nothing to transition to, that there was no other state of being in which it is possible to survive, which meant that, to the follower-believers, everything outside that 'conform/obey-or-else' environment became a great, fear-inducing 'unknown'.
Through history, the forms this tool took were many: some of history's leaders simply jailed or eliminated all those who would 'dare' question, counter or ignore their authority and dictate (thus reinforcing the no-example-to-transition-to state), and yet others found it useful to hide behind psychology-manipulating concept-tools that both tapped into the immature human's fear of separation from their 'protector-provider' (and the 'known, same' following who obeyed their dictate), their fear of punishment, and their most innate and unthinkingly instinctive fear of death (promise of immortality, etc.). No matter the tool used to get them there, the definition of 'good' for a human in this arrested state about amounts to 'same', that is to say, 'same' as whatever they (and others 'like them' following/thought-dependant on the same 'leader') were programmed with until then.
And adult humans in this state are very, very, manipulable and corruptible: throw a few scraps from the leader's follower-fed table to a few 'chosen' (-by-the-leader) followers, and they eerily almost instantaneously transform from unquestioning followers of the leader's dictate into enforcers of the same: again, no matter if their form is superstitious-threat or demonstrable-threat based, examples of the resulting three-level dictatorial hierarchy model (see: of Shepherds, Sheep-dogs and Sheep) can be seen all through history.
The Above transposed onto Modern Society.
Many in more education-and-technology developed societies would like to think themselves exempt from, or immune to, the above dictatorial systems, but they seem strangely blind to the existence of the same, in the form of sub-cultures, in their own would-be democracies: if at least a majority of a population that would call itself a democracy isn't thinking for themselves, it isn't one.Some of the earlier-described switch-blocking tools have proven so effective over the millennia that, even in this post-enlightenment, dwindling-superstition, information-laden world we live in today, a few quite unworthy-of-leadership (or even consultation) humans are desperately trying to hang onto them through attempting to even further intellectually cripple future would-be followers (while setting things up for an easier elimination of future dissenters). And this seems to be the state of the things in the U.S. today.
But things have evolved a bit further than that: those who would shape society through hiding behind imaginary proxies (while shifting attention, responsibility and accountability onto the same), have provided those dictating today's economy with a useful example: since Reagan (and some would say earlier), fear-of-other-spreading politicians have served as very effective distractions from those who are really doing the decision-making, those who decide which products we consume, all while fighting amongst themselves to be the one to control the whole of the cash-cow that is our thoughtless complacency: even those consumers aware of this situation are guilty of supporting it to some degree, but in today's world, it has become near impossible to find any other alternative to it. But the battle for a real consumer awareness (thus a change to the status quo) has only just begun.
One would think that the advent of the internet would have facilitated the dissemination of rational, educated, demonstrable thoughts and ideas to the world, but it has also made it easier for would-be dictators (and their followers) to spread disinformation (fear), bigotry (fear), and irrational fear-of-'other'(-than-followed-dictate) ideas (also fear), and experience has shown us that those who 'need' to make the most noise are often those less deserving of our attention... but to one seeing our networks and screens monopolised by this desperate brouhaha, it may seem that our world is dominated by it, but a closer examination of the declining-criminality-and-war real state of things shows that this is not so.
Filling the Void.
Many would-be dictators disparage the loss of the 'community' aspect that their respective regimes used to bring, and it is true that, at least for the time being, there is not much on the horizon to fill the void, but, in this author's humble opinion, this is largely due to the demoralisation-effect that their respective noise-machines are making (which makes their complaints disingenuous to the core). And the answer to this noise, at least for the time being, seems to be but something best described as a disparate, too-multi-faceted (and distracting-from-real-problem) utopic fog of ambiguity, because, yes, although seemingly well-intentioned, many who would like to make a safe place for themselves in society are not (critically-)thinking beyond the survive-by-imitation bubble of their own 'identity' (sense of comfort, 'self'), either.So, against a 'united in sameness' (and fear-of-different-from-that) voter bloc, what do we have to counter it? For the time being, all we have is a largely silent 'meh' (non-)voter bloc peppered with small-in-comparison 'identity' groups. Concerning the latter, the focus should be on the non-rational fear-of-different survive-through-imitation(-panderers) causing the exclusion, not the excluded. Already, a 'united against all forms of bigotry'4 force would be one to reckon with.
The 'meh' (non-)voter bloc seems to feel that their voice doesn't count, that their voice doesn't matter... but are most of us not living in a democracy? What if we replace the centuries-old 'tradition' of weekly irrational-and-indemonstrable-superstition-and-fear-themed meetings with others that are places to make our thoughts as individuals heard and recorded, to compare, discuss, and morph our individual thoughts into consensus?4 If such a thing were organised around administrative communities from a grassroots level, and the results published to recorded history (online) where others can see and compare (and think about!) the results, hell, I'd participate. And that also could be a force for the ignorance-exploiters-and-panderers-that-be to reckon with.
In short, while the 'follow-minded' go to rallies organised 'for' them by those who dictate 'for' them what's 'good' or 'bad' 'for' them, we who 'dare' think for ourselves would better organise meetings where we can decide, between ourselves, what's good or bad for ourselves.
1 - In any case, it has been widely demonstrated that the brain undergoes a 'pruning' process around adolescence.
2 - This in itself is complex: a child knowing nothing but squalor might not perceive this state as 'uncomfortable'.
3 - Emotions such as empathy (sense of sharing, and the brain 'rewards' thereof), may come into play here, but omitted for simplicity's sake.
4 - No, 'thwarting our promotion of bigotry' is not bigotry.
5 - Does this remind anyone else of anything Classical Greece taught us?
