Anti-brainwash study
One thing I can’t stand is when people don’t behave and speak by logic, but instead by fear, self delusion, bigotry and so on. Even though I don’t like it, I’m not trying to actively fight this with everybody who’s not sharing my point of view – either while it doesn’t make much sense, or it would just mess up my relationships with colleagues, family, friends and so on. But I do fight back when they try to convince me of their ‘truth’ or try to force me to live by their standards. It’s a hard fight though, because you can’t convince them, you can’t win the conversation (you just can make it a draw), and there are many reasons why is that so, they are described by psychology. To not lose the fight completely (when trapped / cornered by illogical arguments), one has to study (at least a bit) their ideas and arguments, and also study supportive stuff from science.
I mostly meet and fight with these thing:
- religion and bigotry - strong religious influence in our country and also in my family, trying to tell me how to live according their weird standards
- anti-vaccination - people who are strongly against vaccination, who base their claims on junk web sites, friends-of-a-friend scary story, their own fear instead of science, medicine, knowledge
- homeopathy - people who believe that very expensive sugar pills with not a single molecule of duck liver and heart from which it’s diluted did cure their flu, or some other similar sugar pills and other diseases which will go away by themselves after a week with or without the usage of that placebo
- conspiracy theories - people who believe that the world is controlled by secret Illuminati group, or that the moon landing was fake, and so on
The simplest and least time consuming things I do to lightly educate myself in these areas are reading web pages aimed at these things together with Wikipedia, and watching youtube channels from the influential people. Some of them are: The Thinking Atheist, Bigot Vanquisher, potholer54, AntiCitizenX and others…
