BEWARE: we are all deceived to some extent; and we are all unaware of the extent and depth of our own conditioning
“This business of not drifting into extreme ideology is very, very important in life. If you want to end up wise, heavy ideology is very likely to prevent that outcome.” {Charlie Munger]
“You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.” (Jesus, Matthew 7:5)
There is a balance that we must strike between self-examination and self-esteem. Just because we feel good about ourselves, does not mean that our minds are not playing tricks on us.
Don't believe everything you think.
Don't believe everything you say.
Don't believe everything you hear.
Don't believe everything you read.
Like it or not, believe it or not, we have all been brainwashed since childhood by cultural conditioning through constant automatic downloading of external messages. Everywhere we turn, there are messages from media and marketing, politics and preaching, education, consumer society, and the powerful conformity of culture telling us
what to think,
how to think,
why to think,
what to value,
what to believe,
who’s right,
who’s wrong.
This conditioning is sustained by its own invisibility and familiarity.
"As long as I don't see my own thinking errors, then 'I'm right.'" (invisibility)
"As long as those around me think like me, then 'I'm right.'" (familiarity)
This is part of the lies we have been fed since childhood.
And now there are even more powerful lies being spread like a virus of the mind through social media and propaganda.
Social Conditioning: the process of training or accustoming a person or animal to behave in a certain way or to accept certain circumstances.
This became more and more clear to me as I began to notice that one of the best predictors of human values and beliefs, including politics, religion, prejudices, beauty, ugliness, righteousness, evil, and even “the other’s” worthiness of life or death is something as concrete, tangible, predictable as a person’s zip code. This is true all around the world. And yet we thoughtlessly proclaim our absolute truth and rightness while damning you and your absolute wrongness.
We are not born human. We are born as a label. We then spend the rest of our lives doing one of two things: confirming that label or becoming human.
