Dogmaphobe
Diamond Member
When I was young, I always felt like an outsider. I could never understand why so may kids did things just because other kids did things. As I grew older, I began to think that the real duality of human nature involved the tension between self awareness and the herd instinct. It seems to me that the entire history of mankind involves the rare free thinker being persecuted by the mob, and that our ability to think as an individual and our need for confirmation by the herd must be hardwired in us to varying degrees. At one end, you have the iconoclasts, heretics and eccentrics, and at the other end, you have the fundamentalists and authoritarians.
Our very political system encourages a Manichaean world view, as we are conditioned to see the world in binary. It is either/or with this polarizing political set up, and so when you combine people's natural inclination towards the herd instinct with a political system built upon opposition, then the polemics and utter vapidness of conformist rhetoric seems inevitable.
I don't see the situation in terms of ideology because the foot soldiers for their side don't have one -- not in terms of a set of principles they follow. All they have is the fear of being ostracized by their peers.
Our very political system encourages a Manichaean world view, as we are conditioned to see the world in binary. It is either/or with this polarizing political set up, and so when you combine people's natural inclination towards the herd instinct with a political system built upon opposition, then the polemics and utter vapidness of conformist rhetoric seems inevitable.
I don't see the situation in terms of ideology because the foot soldiers for their side don't have one -- not in terms of a set of principles they follow. All they have is the fear of being ostracized by their peers.