The End of Isms (Part Five): Conclusions and What to Do

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The series so far:

  1. The End of Isms, Part One: Introduction
  2. The End of Isms, Part Two: What ISMs Do To Your Mind
  3. The End of Isms, Part Three: How ISMs Drive People Apart
  4. The End of Isms, Part Four: The Disastrous Effects of ISMs Upon Society
  5. The End of Isms, Part Five: Conclusions and What to Do

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In the last installment, we talked about ways in which ideology, or camp-thinking, has disastrous effects upon society as a whole. We talked about how isms:

  • create enemies, by perpetuating “Us and Them” thinking
  • create warfare on our lives, even with supposedly “harmless” labels, since they eventually entrench themselves within institutions of power
  • cause us to fear and reject new ideas, since they threaten the status quo
  • cause us to ignore/dismiss desperate cries of warning, since they are perceived as an attack on our “identity” group
  • create the illusion of “sides”, hence legitimize the notion of humanity as separate tribes in perpetual competition for their own “kind”
  • pervert the entire purpose of your society, such that each of us unwittingly plays part in a larger story which continually re-affirms the “Us-Them” distinction until it becomes next to impossible to challenge

Now, let’s discuss the all-important question: what do we do about it?

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The End of ISMs (Part Four): The Disastrous Effects of ISMs Upon Society

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This is Part Four of a series on ideologies and their disastrous consequences for you, for relationships between people and for society as a whole. If you haven’t read parts One, Two or Three, please do so, since the material here expands on (and repeatedly refers to) that content.

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To summarize the last installment, we talked about ways in which ideology, or camp-thinking, has disastrous effects on your ability to understand (and be understood by) others, and hence leads to breakdowns in communication and the perpetuation of divisions between people. We talked about how isms:

  • encourage you to surrender your thinking and perception of truth to leaders, experts, authority figures and gurus
  • arbitrarily divide like things (such as humans) into un-like things, by imposing our limited perspectives on them and fixing those differences in place with identity labels
  • invariably mean different things to different people, hence increase the likelihood of being misunderstood
  • invariably result in a breakdown of communication and the dead-end of name-calling
  • are enormous wastes of time, since most of it is spent defining and untangling our classifications for one another, and very little on actually communicating the content of our thoughts

 

I want to reiterate that what I mean by “ideologies” or “isms” is camp-thinking, i.e., Continue reading →

The End of Isms (Part Three): How ISMs Drive People Apart

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This is Part Three of an ongoing series on ideologies and their disastrous consequences for you, for relationships between people and for society as a whole. If you haven’t read Part One or Part Two, I highly recommend going back to do so, since the material here expands on (and repeatedly refers to) that content.


The series so far:
  1. The End of Isms, Part One: Introduction
  2. The End of Isms, Part Two: What ISMs Do To Your Mind
  3. The End of Isms, Part Three: How ISMs Drive People Apart
  4. The End of Isms, Part Four: The Disastrous Effects of ISMs Upon Society
  5. The End of Isms, Part Five: Conclusions and What to Do

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To summarize the last installment, we talked about ways in which ideology, or Continue reading →

The End of Isms (Part Two): What ISMs Do To Your Mind

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This is Part Two of an ongoing series on ideologies and their disastrous consequences for you, for relationships between people and for society as a whole. If you haven’t read Part One, I highly recommend doing so now, since the material here expands on (and repeatedly refers to) that content.

The series so far:

  1. The End of Isms, Part One: Introduction
  2. The End of Isms, Part Two: What ISMs Do To Your Mind
  3. The End of Isms, Part Three: How ISMs Drive People Apart
  4. The End of Isms, Part Four: The Disastrous Effects of ISMs Upon Society
  5. The End of Isms, Part Five: Conclusions and What To Do

*

To summarize Part One, we talked about how ideologies, or “isms”: Continue reading →

The End of Isms (Part One)

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Cartman:   Wait… Isn’t everybody at war over atheism?

Shvek:   Atheism? No. We’ve learned to get rid of all the isms in our time.

Medic:   Yes. Long ago we realized isms are great for those who are rational, but in the

 hands of irrational people, isms always lead to violence.

Cartman:  So there is no war now in the future.

Blavius: Of course there’s war! The stupid French-Chinese think they have a right to

 Hawaii.

All: Yeah!!

-South Park, Episode 10.13: Go God Go XII

 

I sure thought that put a nail in it. I cheered at the TV and went happily to bed thinking that Matt and Trey had struck at the heart of human idiocy and we would wake up to a new and wiser world.

Alas, apparently no one watches South Park.

Or if they do, they don’t understand it.

Isms, you see, continued right on the next morning. Sorry Matt and Trey, you tried. As powerful a force for change as Cartman is, isms have been around a lot longer.

So long, in fact, that the modern world is drowning in its own philosophies.

It is choking to death on ideology.

Thinking people intuitively know this. They cringe as they hear politicians speak of “sides” Continue reading →