How do ideas influence us from day to day? Is it possible to allow mindset and perspectives to ultimately destroy the messages we sometimes seek to offer those around us?
Erik at the Contact website recently did an interesting piece on how polarization that stems from a “memetic” mindset (building on the popular notion of the “meme” first proposed by Richard Dawkins in the 1970s) may actually affect the message of those who it seeks to reach. “There is nothing inherently wrong with a memetic mindset unless the mindset is one of division, polarity or a superiority complex in nature,” he argues, pointing to how this notion of polarization, plainly visible in politics, science, religion, and even the study of unusual phenomena, leads to an unhealthy divide that ousts and ostracizes the rational skeptic, who gets lost in a quagmire somewhere between the extremes.
Their are two major infectious memes plaguing the Paranormal Community today and they are easily recognized as the two camps known as the True Believers and the Debunkers leaving the precious few Skeptics scattered haphazardly and thinly throughout the middle somewhere.
Along with Erik’s ideas, Rick Stokes at The Anomalist added today that, “When zeal, memetic mindsets, hubris, and fervor overcome an individual by those gifted in persuasion, yet without true knowledge, we allow the harm of their polarity to affect us.” Have you ever felt that the messages conveyed under certain circumstances, whether by believer or debunker, left or right, spiritualist or agnostic, etc, is inherently flawed by virtue of its extremity? How often can people effectively juxtapose differing perspectives to compare and effectively analyze, giving the overall argument some kind of solid merit?
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It’s something of a conundrum for sure. We invest so much emotion and ego in our political choices