What is Our Defining Characteristic?
We are incomprehensible to the Alkozirans. It took them years to realize what they now believe defines us and explains our behavior. Most of our actions made no sense to them until their most imaginative anthropologist hit on this insight:
Humans Believe What They Want to Believe!
This was so unnerving for the Alkozirans that it took the anthropologist many painful years of data gathering to convince the rest of the scientific community. They were slow to accept it, but now, as far as they are concerned, it is the basic fundamental defining characteristic of all humanity. To them it explains everything. During my years there I managed to convince some of the scientists that not all humans always believe what they want to believe. But I couldn’t deny that it’s true for most of us, and pretty well explains a lot of human behavior.
What We Choose to Believe
Okay, you say. Maybe we are a little goofy that way. But is that justification for extermination?
No, it’s not. And though it creeps them out, it’s not what worries the Alkozirans about us: It’s what so many of us choose to believe that scares the hell out of them. Because what we choose to believe says, to the Alkozirans, so many bad things about us.
Think about that. Why do we choose to believe what we believe?
That Brings Us to Gullimentalism
I made up that word. Can you guess what it means?
Yup, it’s a combination of gullible and fundamentalism.
A first important step on the road to sanity, is to learn to recognize, fear, and dread all forms of fundamentalism. In a page to come we will define and elucidate fundamentalism. But simply put, it starts with deciding first what we want to believe, then making sure all the data and information agrees with us. We put all our thinking and arguing powers into proving we are right, everyone else is wrong. Being absolutely right empowers us to ridicule, bully, even torture and kill the evil wrong folks who disagree with us.
When we take this path, something happens to our capacity to think and reason objectively. When it comes to anything concerning our specific fundamental ideologies, we become completely gullible. All fundamentalists, when it comes to their specific true beliefs, become blind and gullible. ALL fundamentalists. You can not remain a fundamentalist, unless you remain gullible. No exceptions.
Since humans first got organized, leaders and politicians have used our gullimentalism to manipulate and control us. We’ll talk about this too.
Fundamentalism is a constricting mind trap. The deeper we go into it, the more difficult, perhaps even impossible, it becomes to see clearly and to see past the dark nearly unbreakable glass into which we have enclosed ourselves.
Open-mindedness is the liberating antipode (it’s a word, look it up) of fundamentalism. It can start with an understanding of the philosophy of tisrigo. This is an amazing, beautiful, fascinating universe. You hardly know anything about it, and that’s okay. That politician, guru, or religious leader, you’ve put on a pedestal, doesn’t either. You know the one. He’s so certain, so self-righteous, so angry at all those people who’s fault all our problems are, and so full of BSL. He doesn’t know anything either. Why are we letting them manipulate us?
You can be religious. You can be opinionated. You can be decisive.
You just can’t be a gullimentalist.
And I strongly advise against being a conservative fundamentalist talk show host. I have it on good authority that, in another universe on another parallel earth, technology progressed much faster than here, and their Jesus came after television and talk shows were invented. On that world, Jesus said “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a conservative talk show host to get to heaven. It is seventy times seven (or 490) times worse than being rich. Wish I’d warned them back on earth.”
So let’s open our minds and get going. So much to learn. So many possibilities, and nothing to fear, but gullimentalism and the purveyors of fear.
tisrigo 