Here’s something I don’t explicitly acknowledge very often, though I think I’ve mentioned it before. There is a substantial portion of humanity made up of clear-thinking people, people who understand at an early age why community and religious myths exist, and why they don’t conform to the reality of the universe. These are the people who have thought around and through those stories and learned to deal with the world as it is. They are the ones who have built our modern technological civilization. But the next stage of wisdom is to realize that since those stories *do* exist, they serve a cultural purpose that is functional and cannot be denied, and that have to be lived with.
But by substantial, I think, maybe 10%. I’ve gone into length about this before and won’t do so again right now. And perhaps I am wrong.
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But this is why it’s fascinating for me to compile so many instances of irrationality. “Humanity cannot bear very much reality” according to T.S. Eliot. (Updated here on 10Oct) If I seem to be tearing on conservatives, it’s not because of any animosity toward conservatives per se; it’s because the people who believe things that are not objectively true, that are instead downright absurd, the people who fail to live up to the ideals of whatever documents — Bible, Constitution — they claim to venerate in preference for behavior easily explainable through an understanding of primitive human nature as it evolved over millions of years in humanity’s ancestral environment, those people claim to be conservatives. And it’s examples of those beliefs and behaviors that fascinate me, not criticizing any one group of people. There’s a distinction here. Still, it’s useful to look upward once in a while, and not downward.
So let’s skip the JMG examples for today. There are many of them every day. Let’s find a piece about the big picture.
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