No question that our hindbrains are far more powerful than the tiny, new wrinkled cortext/cerebellum that thinks it runs the show. Newt Gingrich's recent position on free speech is a clear and compelling example of this.
The Constitution of the United States is a clear and compelling example of what can happen when people somehow have the reasoning parts of their brains in control.
http://cat5.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3FB8080F187BD18!681.trak
Sunday, December 3, 2006
Gingrich Not Insane -- He's Just Drawn That Way
I'm sure Mr. Gingrich believes in what he's saying. I learned long ago to keep in mind that the ravings of madmen aren't always. . .well. . .ravings -- that these people are actually expressing ideas and perspectives in which they have an actual belief -- often, which they've thought through quite carefully.
And that's what makes it so frightening. We go through life thinking we're more or less rational creatures, but we forget how easy it is -- how terrifyingly easy -- for our emotions and belief systems to subvert our intellect, turning it from a reasoned consideration of ideas to a tool for the potent ideologies that have co-opted its functionality.
We've only been "thinking" creatures for perhaps a few hundred thousand years. We've been emotive creatures with powerful drives, urges and hard-wired needs -- e.g. territoriality, revenge -- for millions of years. The veneer of civilization is thin, painfully thin.
That's one of the things that makes our Constitution such a beautiful and almost sacred text. It formalizes so many of the structures that have evolved from the parts of our brains that think, and provides a real buffer -- a potent meme in itself -- against the subversion of our rationality by the parts of our brain that are run on ideology (and though ideologies have a deservedly bad rap today, you can sure get a lot of mileage out of them).
So, read the MSNBC article -- then think about the last time that your rational mind -- the part of you that makes decisions and decides what's right and wrong -- was subverted or suborned by the part of you that feels and reacts, the part that is driven by a desire to believe, rather than a desire to understand.
And that's what makes it so frightening. We go through life thinking we're more or less rational creatures, but we forget how easy it is -- how terrifyingly easy -- for our emotions and belief systems to subvert our intellect, turning it from a reasoned consideration of ideas to a tool for the potent ideologies that have co-opted its functionality.
We've only been "thinking" creatures for perhaps a few hundred thousand years. We've been emotive creatures with powerful drives, urges and hard-wired needs -- e.g. territoriality, revenge -- for millions of years. The veneer of civilization is thin, painfully thin.
That's one of the things that makes our Constitution such a beautiful and almost sacred text. It formalizes so many of the structures that have evolved from the parts of our brains that think, and provides a real buffer -- a potent meme in itself -- against the subversion of our rationality by the parts of our brain that are run on ideology (and though ideologies have a deservedly bad rap today, you can sure get a lot of mileage out of them).
So, read the MSNBC article -- then think about the last time that your rational mind -- the part of you that makes decisions and decides what's right and wrong -- was subverted or suborned by the part of you that feels and reacts, the part that is driven by a desire to believe, rather than a desire to understand.
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