What do global warming deniers, Creationists, Gotcha politics, Cynthia Sommer's prosecution or just doing a crossword have in common? I’m talking about very strong hunches, gut feelings (not a pop group); we human beings have a center in our brains that might be called the "A-ha" center which lights up when there is a positive compare of presumed facts that either reinforce existing ideas or even results in a new "understanding" or belief about something.
It may not actually relate to hard verifiable evidence at all. But it can feel very right! And it lets us deal with a lot of related issues fairly quickly and avoid inaction. Democracy is based on informed consent and informed understanding of the "A-ha" moment. Democrats and Republicans may tend to see the world depending on how flexible they are with their A-ha moments.
The problem is that this area of our brains lights up independent of whether the new realization is true or partially true or not true at all; it is mostly belief to start with. And when we feel an "A-ha" moment it sometimes feels like a powerful revelation. More often it is a more mundane and casual "A-ha". For instance, when I am doing a crossword I have some working notions and evidence to guess what a particular word actually is. I have constant semi A-has which nevertheless must be questioned and doubted if I want to get to an actual valid A-ha when I prove to myself that I do in fact have the correct word. Sometimes I predicate a good chunk of a crossword on one "definite" word which later turns out to be wrong. I had a strong "A-ha" to start with and confidently set off to solve the rest with many other wrong A-has" seeming to agree with the first. For a while it is all internally consistent till it becomes obvious even to me that I’m on the wrong track. It takes a lot of "A-has" big and small to solve a crossword puzzle. I do start with a knowledge of spelling and language and names and places etc but I can go through a lot of wrong A-has that eventually must be re-evaluated and even jettisoned. It’s good practice for reality up to a point, but in the real world there is no finished puzzle and we can go on living life based on faulty A-Has for years.
Those who get A-Has often in life are better prepared to reflect on and them and possibly modify or doubt them when challenged with additional tests. For those who do not get that experience often an A-ha is more likely to be accepted whole and without question especially if they have been raised to put up and shut up and accept what they are told and especially when a potential "A-ha" may be distressing or challenging. TV news-people, politicians, preachers, celebs, cult leaders are great when they more or less are in sync with most of reality but when they start to diverge from that too much they drag a whole lot of people with them and eventually a lot of them and others (even the whole planet) can get hurt. If Global climate change is as dangerous as many reliable sources have proven the deniers and their supporters will block solutions and drag us all over the precipice. If Creationists shut down much of our scientific education to succeed in their goal of making everyone disbelieve Evolution it will hold the whole country back from understanding with many aspects of public health, stem cell research, and much more.
There are plenty of chances every day for a hunch to emerge out of an endless stream of suggestive misinformation that lead many of us to the wrong conclusions and disastrous courses of action.
A wife who may have poisoned her husband v. a healthy 23 year old dropping dead for no apparent reason, AHA! A hunch that "the Butler wife did it"
The whole earth and mankind with it in danger vs. evil or misguided tree huggers and suspect academics threatening the economic prosperity of your nation AHA enemies of the US or greedy grant addicts feeding a lie
Your belief in an afterlife and higher beings predicated on absolute inerrancy of a holy book challenged by evidence that the world is far older and humans a recent natural development. AHA must be an Atheist-Humanist conspiracy...
Media focus on contrived trivia and implied crimes or secret beliefs to distract the public from real problems and issues accepted because it seems to jibe with your trusted sources for making sense of things. AHA we must vote for flag pin wearers
All too often the comforting, easier conclusion or explanation is the one chosen to deal with A-Has that come up. And all the more easy if the co-Dependants, leaders and mouthpieces of the dominant thought-stylers of a person's life provide a pre-packaged version of it to accept without complicated doubts. If you are in this group think process, TeeVee will wave a scary proposition or version of the facts and then wrap it all up with soothing words from a latter day witch finder general who provides a label and a quick disposal of doubts and worries and a defined target for fear and anger; maybe a "trouble maker" who, as far as you are concerned, has troubled the world for no good reason or maybe is a perp already deemed guilty by a News-u-tainment channel. This guided, view-molding process affirms that you are with the good guys and the bad guys have been outed and opinions have been neatly primed for it to be dealt with. You’re A-Ha moments are not your own.
You may have doubts if you hear a contrary message or have an A-Ha moment that seems have the ring of truth but how you deal with it depends on everything you bring to the equation. If you have given up control of your ideas and A-Ha moments to your "reliable" sources who lump concerns over the planet with wacky dangerous lunatic fringe that "Hates America" or similar notions, then information from Al Gore and others must be rejected and ridiculed. The first bit of seemingly logical evidence couched in the familiar terms of your shared world view that is used to back up the voices you believe in will give you a comfortable "A-ha compare" and then allow you to confidently ignore any contrary evidence. You have added to the truth you believe and there is no need to revisit the concepts until someday you may notice a huge disparity between what you have bought into and reality maybe in the form of a really large climate change type OH-OH, A-Ha! Oh-No! right outside your door.
We may be born with a need to have a fairly stable non-changing set of related ideas of how the universe works without any desire to question or modify it once a main set of learning curves become established. So, by the end of childhood plus a second phase in adolescence, this programming of our world view is established and more especially in those predisposed to rigidity. Contrary evidence must be denied or set aside in an ongoing process of self deception.
Those of us who may be born to be more adaptable (most Dkos-ers of course) may come to a junction where one last bit of information will trigger a genuine major a-ha! moment. We might at that point be able to adjust a fundamental belief to be more in line with a newer awareness or even Set it aside or replace it with another that makes more sense. But we are not built to be able to do that easily. As hunter gatherers we learned valuable lessons on survival and our place and our tribes place in the world. It would have been a complete mix of facts about our environment and various amounts of mumbo-jumbo and half truths as well. But it was all internally consistent and we had the needed expertise on the world around which did not change a lot. We still had the ability to learn and develop but it had a longer time with in stable circumstances. Changes, especially unexpected changes, challenged the status quo and existing paradigms and coming up with answers and solutions meant sometimes replacing previous ideas. The A-ha moments were often ways of coming up with explanations that fit with existing dogma and at the most adapting it. Our problem is one that is outlined in 1970 by Alvin Toffler's in his Book Future shock A phrase which he defined as:
"too much change in too short a period of time"
The stronger the changes and the more abrupt the revelations of new realities and new understandings the more likely that a de-stabilizing new A-Ha moment would arise. There would be a lot of resistance to change and unless the dislocations were strong enough or the person with the AHA! moment was a strong enough leader the outcome might be an even stronger adherence to tried and tested "Old Ways". Sticking with the old ways may benefit you materially or just underpin your concepts of the universe but it will benefit some members of your group at the expense of everyone eventually. When a flood shows up or you get mistakenly arrested and charged for something you did not do or for something entirely imaginary you may realize that the emperors of your world are stark staring nude and may come to see that when hacks who pass certain belief tests on reality hold positions in Law enforcement, Justice, economics, Business, Medicine, Government and even higher education or the military this effectively blinds society as a whole to important A-ha moments.
The danger is these people in important positions will not understand disease or social issues or macro economics, ecology or climatology and won’t be able to anticipate or solve problems in A-Ha blind spots and eventually all of us will suffer some consequence. These are people who do not allow facts to conflict with rigid world views and so cannot allow in ideas that may give their foundations a good, "A-ha" moment shaking. Their "A-has" tend to be false ones that validate a set of assumptions that cannot be challenged. In more local situations Authorities base actions on false compares of informations and come up with unchallenged imaginary scenarios that seem quite reasonable.
Returning to an item in the news that in part inspired this diary, I imagine the law enforcement people who had some sort of "A-ha" moment with Cynthia Sommers felt they couldn’t allow a perp to get away with their "crime". Their A-Ha moment hunch told them they would also be letting down a member of the armed forces on the home front. Their big A-ha was based on Cynthia was not behaving the way they thought she should. After that all the participants in the investigation and prosecution were going with a hunch. And it does not take a willful falsification if everyone is operating on the basis of a false "A-ha" you find what you expect to find and perhaps a lab worker was inept or perhaps they found a way to help convict someone why was "known" to be guilty. Can’t let the guilty get away with it and it would be terrible to betray the victim...only there was no victim and there was no poison.
Those who may be born with the possibility of being more adaptable may come to a moment where one last bit of evidence or a new concept allows all the suppressed contrary memes to be allowed out and overturn an imposed artificial set of beliefs. Sort of when a cult member gets an "A-ha" moment and is able to leave the group at least mentally and eventually physically. The trouble is that an A-ha moment powerful enough in the right person to achieve this is relatively rare. We have evolved to be social creatures and with that is a tendency to loyalty to our group. It takes a lot of different thinking to be able to allow in let alone accept some a new "A-ha" moment and use it to break free of ideas that your group follows and maybe being a traitor or outcast in the process. We often have we have little "A-has" we come to see as erroneous as we filter events through our accepted sources of information. All too often these episodes that could allow a new understanding are denied and events are quickly reinterpreted to appear in agreement with what you already "know".
Whole religions and swathes of history good, bad, Sublime, hilarious and scary have originated in the A-Ha! moments of major historical figures. Some may have been nuts or misguided or enlightened but they were utterly convinced by their A-Ha! insights and we and our world are the many faceted result. Some of the revelations or imaginings were blessings and many have been curses. Some put 222 together once too many and came up with delusions of apocalypse. But as powerful as A-ha moments have been in history the powers that be are jealous of the power of these hunches and once in control do their best to co-opt or deflect competing ones....
Religious cults, political movements etc. usually operate control and guidance mechanisms particularly in their youth groups that short circuit "wrong" A-Ha! moments and engineering ones that re-enforce the groups messages and rationalize any inconvenient contradictions. Cults in particular have detailed processes designed to help the stricken follower to think their way back into comfortable belief. Without authorities micromanaging people’s perceptions we are more likely to come up with more rational freer conclusions.
If you lived in North Korea or the Old Soviet Union or Nazi Germany or in a Moonie cult or a FLDS compound the Authoritarian control of ideas would be much more overt, stark and successful. A-Ha moments are scripted and acted out and accepted. In the US today things are generally more fluid but the deck seems increasingly stacked against free exchange of ideas and many do not want it and are happy to have it that way. As the Devo song so cogently put it
"Freedom of choice is what we got, Freedom FROM choice is what we want."
Recent research shows that too much choice is confusing and destabilizing and very many people shy away from this extreme. And since people are uneasy with too many shades of gray they seem to prefer a routine pigeon-holing of ideas. A digital thinking, pass fail system allows us to focus our limited time on immediate day to day issues. But with the world so interconnected and complex we have to rely on others doing a lot of the snap judgments for us. And we do not have time to ponder a lot of maybes which may be very alarming if we think about them too much. Good guys-bad guys, right-wrong, yes or no for way too many things makes life easier to get through till we pay the price of ignoring too many maybes that may be a way back to dealing with reality more successfully.
We have to be open to our "A-ha" moments but suspicious of them as well. If we depend too much on others to frame them and explain them we are betraying ourselves and each other.
http://www.freecynthia.com/
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