Principles of the (Insert Nation Here) Cargo Cult

[sbisson]

A couple of days ago I found a link to this (whether it was from BoingBoing or Making Light I'm not sure...). It was originally titled "Principles Of The American Cargo Cult".

The following section neatly describes what I go so annoyed about to inspire my previous post:

Ignorance is innocence

Complicated explanations are suspect

The world is simple, and there must be a simple explanation for everything.

Certainty is strength, doubt is weakness

Admitting alternatives is undermining one's own belief.
Changing one's mind means one has wasted the time spent holding the prior opinion.

Your opinion matters as much as anyone else's

When a person has studied a topic, he has no more real knowledge than you do, just a hidden agenda.

The herd should be followed

The contemplative lemming gets trampled
Popular beliefs must be true.
No bad idea can survive.
People are generally smart.
Even if a popular belief doesn't pan out, at least you'll be in the same boat as everyone else.

Thinking about it, that rant is really is about all of us, not just America, and about how people have adjusted their world-views to cope with living in an information dense society where they have been disempowered and demeaned by those in control. Acquiescing isn't enough - we have to convince ourselves that we're doing it of our own free will.

We're living in Zimbardo's prison experiment and we haven't even noticed.