Schlagwort: culture clash

*me takes a deep breath*

Only one word to start with commenting the outcome of todays acclamation:

FEAR

This voting shows clearly how fear works in politics. I’m always surprided how simple it is. The message «Islam wants conquer Switzerland, Europe, the world and Minarets are the spearheads» get us on a level of lowest animal insticts and as fast as you can’t wink Christianity feel threatened with extinction. What a bullshit, today, in the year 2009!

On the other hand, a message like «America wants to dominate the world and Coca Cola tins are the bullets» works absolutely the same way. How surprising. I call this behavior our bioligical heritage and it works since hundreds of million years. If you know how to play this claviature of fear you don’t need any good rational arguments, you only need to fuel the animal interface.

Now, what really fears me ist the fact that this works on our level of education. This makes me thoughtful. In an evolutionary era where religions are going through their last jerks, because moral changes from dogmas to educational insights, we have such a backslide. But, that’s normal in evolution, unfortunately.

The convinience of belief systems  is that it gives you simple answers and you can, but don’t need to think for yourself. Even if one do, most will think in conditioned ways which leeds them to the conclusion, that they and their group is right and all others are wrong. Now fuel the animal interface with fear and you can go to war – no one will ask questions, they become fanatics. Since we know that we know nothing, all is belief – so it works with every belief system, whether religious, political, scientific or anything else like climate or Peak Oil discussion, e.g.

In this context you may want to read about the Dunning-Kruger effect on Wikipedia (The unskilled suffer from illusory superiority, rating his own ability above average). Please do, you may see public discussios from a different angle.

Polarization is what’s happening right now. When the force of separation breaks, as more apart the poles are the harder the clash will be. The secret of power is to balance between polarization and clash: Polarization to absorbe intellectual advance and clash to conquer to spread power (and heal economics, if you are clever. That’s why swiss citizens didn’t vote against export of weapons in another voting proposal today. What a crime in the year 2009! But I’m not sure it’s so clever in the end.)

To me the signs are obviously: Through polarization we’re hardening our belief systems which will lead in a collision. In combination with high tech (power of atoms, bio- and nanotech, etc) it could be disatrous – and I fear it will be. But I refuse to project my fear onto Minarets – my logic does not allow this. It’s like saying because Catholics doesn’t allow condoms and therefore the pope is a mass murderer (what is sadly true in times of AIDS), we tear down catholic spires to stop him/them.

The first approach I found on facebook.

If you like, read more about hard and soft systems in evolutionary context: Basic concept of Hinduism possibly the best believe system for future.