Categorical Denial

Our need to give simple and vague labels to large groups of individual actions and events relieves a potential mental burden by reducing the need for critical thinking in hiding away details that always differentiate one set of circumstances from another. Ironically, this desire for consistency results in inconsistent reactions and attitudes because no two actions are identical. It is nonsense to pretend they are in order to give us mindless permission to apply the same reactions to a designated category of actions. When it comes to human behavior, there are simply too many variables in play to assert one event is equivalent to another. Our reactions to any event should be appropriate its uniqueness.

Our Obsessive Need For a Changeless Cause

One of humanity's obsessive but under-noticed pursuits is the search for a stable and unchanging framework on which to hang everything we discover and experience. These efforts range from the creation of mythologies, adages, creeds, axioms and religions, to the scientific pursuit of a Theory of Everything. It also plays out in what I've called founderism, which contains within it the desire for something foundational to not only be forever fixed, but that it has been accurately discovered. This need to discover and revere a reliable and enduring primary "truth" that can't be challenged is, like any obsession, an unintended cause of dreadful behavior. Rivals in this quest can treat each other like vermin. Foes congeal into antagonizing groups that can sometimes reach the point of full-scale war.

If it exists, our descendants may one day come across an undeniably perfect description of the universe and how it works that can be used as the basis to discover a verifiable answer to any question imagined. If it happens, what conclusion it ends up producing about the path we took to get there will put a stain on the victory.

Religion Justifies All

Anyone looking to justify any action (or inaction) can always find one in religion, which means it will likely never die.

Hypothesis as Proof

Many of us make the major mistake of confusing a hypothesis with a conclusion that doesn't need to be verified. For example, it is often stated that abstinence-only sex "education" for teens is valid because if teens don't have sex there can be no pregnancies, abortions or problems with STDs. As statistics show, the areas that don't provide full and accurate sexual education to teens are the ones with the highest levels of teen pregnancies and abortions. The unrecognized cause of the discrepancy is the idea behind the abstinence-only movement is a hypothesis, not a verified conclusion.

The way it should be approached is to state the idea as a hypothesis: "If we expose teens to abstinence-only ideas, there will be fewer teen pregnancies, abortions and issues with STDs." That is a statement that can be tested and verified. Instead, proponents state this as an already-proved claim which allows them to ignore the actual results.

Here are additional examples:

People will kill at the same rate with or without guns
Captialism works because of the invisible hand
It's better for everyone to be selfish
Marijuana use leads to abusing other drugs
Welfare leads to people not wanting to work
Taxing the rich leads to calamity and hurts poor people
Taxing the poor makes them work harder

Vitamin supplements are just as good as vitamins in food
Spare the rod, spoil the child

Pro-Dystopia

If a group was formed with the specific goal of bringing on a dystopian future, it would hard to find a difference in whatever plans they adopt and the Tea Party/Libertarian agenda.

Freezing 1789

For those who claim that only Christians in the U.S. have religious freedom because Christianity was the religion used by the country's founders when the Bill of Rights was adopted, they should also agree that only the arms available to the founders should be relevant too.

Illusionary Rights

Rights must remain as protections for all, unable to be rescinded or forfeited for any treason. Otherwise, they are an illusion.

Clan Kids

For me, articles like these ("Why So Many People Care So Much About Others' Sex Lives") highlight a social bias that children have always been seen as the sole responsibility of their biological parents in every human society, past and present.

I'm only tapping in to a general memory of history and sociology books I've read over my lifetime, but I know many of them outlined societies where children were seen as everyone's responsibility. I think it would be an insane proposal to them that biological parents be the only ones responsible for their children. They did pay attention to family relationships, of course, but these connections were used to identify membership in a large and complicated clan structure, not to isolate a "nuclear" family from everyone else in the larger group. Given that social structure, their attitudes about sex would have to be different than the conclusions in this article. 

The Israel Experiment

It is entirely fair to now admit Israel to be a failed social engineering experiment. Turning the population that was living there prior to the country's creation into inmates of a closed and disjointed reservation-zoo system cannot be claimed a success.

Do You See What I See?

Using religion as an example, I used to wonder hard about how people can read the same book and come up with different conclusions--thousands of different conclusions, in fact. But after reading comments people leave below on-line articles and blog posts I have realized the phenomenon is more-or-less universal. It's hard to find a string of comments where all of them take into account the actual content of the article. Some are so wrong they even completely miss the wording of the headline.

I'm not sure what to make of this specifically, but it's clear evidence of human incompetency and blind bias that keeps misery alive.

Cause As Justification

I don't understand the reasoning behind the “it's just business” defense. How can some bad condition be justified by simply stating its cause?

We could also use this faulty mindset for “it's just religion” or “it's just the law.” When the existence of a problem is realized, we have a responsibility to step up and make it better, not try and justify it by simply stating the cause of the problem.

False "Too Much" Exemptions

It is correctly said that too much of anything can be bad for you, but many mistakenly think age or an agonizing life are exceptions to that adage.

Childhood Path of Corruption

From Raw Story:

A study published in the July issue of Cognitive Science determined that children who are not exposed to religious stories are better able to tell that characters in “fantastical stories” are fictional — whereas children raised in a religious environment even “approach unfamiliar, fantastical stories flexibly.”

...

This conclusion contradicts previous studies in which children were said to be “born believers,” i.e. that they possessed “a natural credulity toward extraordinary beings with superhuman powers. Indeed, secular children responded to religious stories in much the same way as they responded to fantastical stories — they judged the protagonist to be pretend.”

This early start toward the acceptance of fantasy as factual is not to be ignored in our pursuit of discovering how to improve our future.

Still Sleeping

Has the popular "Wake Up, America!" ever had an effect on anyone, ever?

Alien Babysitter

I often think that if a superior alien race were to visit us, their first move would be to assign us a babysitter.

Waiting for Hate

It seems that some people are drawn in by a positive message but only get locked in when it also includes something they can agree to hate.

Conspiracies of the Gaps

"This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety."

So, it's possible, I think, that conspiracy theories can also come from this mindset because it's a justification of positions that otherwise have no basis.

How Not to Be Gay

Those who are most vehemently anti-gay like to claim homosexuality is a choice but also declare it to be one unavailable to them, the only example I can think of where some supposedly optional "behavior" is excluded from a limited group of people based on their misunderstanding of it.

The Failure of Founderism

There is a tendency within political, cultural and religious structures to give uncritical weight to whatever person or group of people are seen as founders of the body in question. This can reach a level that deserves the term founderism, a doctrine that decrees the declarations of founders are to always be followed. Even if circumstances would otherwise dictate a new path, a founderist still insists on following whatever instructions or statements can be ascribed to a founder(s).

This is a disastrous notion because no one at any point in time should be given control over those who follow. No one can predict the future, let alone be wise enough to make statements that would be relevant for all time. It is no secret that change is the only permanent aspect of the human condition, and to refuse to be adaptable is a notion that should allow us to easily spot the flaw in founderism.

But many of us prefer the perceived stability that comes from a never-changing set of rules, and love it even more so if those rules can be said to come from a source that is seen as perfect. Any perceived and predicted stability is a mirage, as changes will always accumulate to a point where old rules don't function. But founderism ignores this reality in favor of the dangerous notion that if the rules seem to no longer work, we are the ones not doing something right in applying them because the rules can't be faulty in a founderist's mind.

The most obvious examples of the harm founderism brings have to do with things like fundamentalist religions and political adherence to documents like the Bible and U.S. Constitution. Trying to make these outdated ideas work only creates a series of collapses, the opposite of the stability founderist's desire. We should always remember that we are responsible for ourselves and that responsibility is a moving target that requires we use the best information and tools at our disposal, things that are fortunately in a state of constant improvement. To insist what we learn as we move forward should be ignored for the thoughts of people from any point in the past is faulty on its face.

Hate Thyself

We are members of species that creates political, social and religious movements that successfully teach people to hate themselves and act on that idea.