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SOCIAL MASKS/BELIEFS
I'm gonna write up a quick social theory and then just keep typing till I'm bored.
As people grow more socially proficient they grow less and less like themselves. In order to compensate for personality differences, they become experts of misdirection and subterfuge, allowing them to engage many different social groups, and ideologies.
This manifests itself in many ways, one of the most notable of which is the creating of social masks. While with one group they wear one and while with another, another mask is donned. These "masks" basically consist of accepted themes of discussion, types of humor, and levels and kinds of judgement on other people. By combining these elements into packages "masks" are created that allow people to quickly switch between predefined sets of behaviors in order to be deemed acceptable by the current people they are around.
However, as people learn to use these masks more efficiently and without concious thought, the transformation becomes instantaneous. By the teenage years, the person no longer makes any concious choice (if indeed, they ever did in the first place) but instead change so rapidly and automatically that the donning of a new mask is no longer noticed by the person.
This is all wrapped up in a culture that values (more than anything it seems, these days) quick witty responses to anything. Soundbite responses from anything from common banter to philosophy are all the order of the day. When someone makes a "witty" comment (flippant, more like) I would wager that they almost never (less than 1% of the time) consider whether or not they actually believe the reprecussions or implications of that flippant comment. The comment was merely made to be funny and or clever. This seems harmless and maybe it is, but one wonders where the intellectual community is going when teenagers are being socially indoctrinated to fire off quick responses to anything based on there own personal beliefs.
This is only theoretical, but I think it may actually result in a loss of belief. Where thoughts are not catalogued in any sort of logical order because they are believed but rather stored so that they can be referenced to make a funny comment. Some things are considered "politically incorrect" and those may cross the line, but that really isn't the issue. Whether or not the comment is offensive is totally irrelevant to what I'm saying. Maybe this isn't so bad, teenagers not having any specific beliefs, because its suposed to be a time of change and exploration and identity creation or whatever, but it occurs to me that the teenagers themselves should at least believe they have real beliefs whether or not they are truly ridiculous or not.
I dunno. I am sick of people and their apathy. Believe something. If you don't believe anything then what is the point of living? Because to me, if you don't believe in something than nihilism is justified and everyone should join a suicide pact because if you believe in nothing then life isn't worth living right? Now scientists want to argue that this means there is a biological drive to keep ourselves alive because of the theory of evoloution.
But why is that true? Why is that drive there? When you ask enough "whys" you still draw blanks at the end because scientists dont know "why" we are here. So to me, that makes the whole evoloution thing sort of pointless. If there isnt a full train of logic, then the end can't be true right? If the begining has no explanation how can any explanation that follows from it ever be sufficient to prove anything? The point is, there is a much easier explanation, and that is that we are meant to believe in things. We are supposed to. Using my own line of logic against me, one might argue that I cannot explain "why" we are meant to believe in things, but then they misunderstand belief. At the point we leave the realm of science, its no longer my burden to prove that.
Here's why: a belief IS the why. It is the building block of reason that everything else is built on. It is the Assumed, the Inherent, the Faith. These ARE the why. So why must we believe something? Because if we don't we lack the "why" for anything else. Basic fundamental beliefs are at the core of human existence. So while scientists can prattle on about gene selection and Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest, doesn't it make more sense to simply accept the fact that belief is a necessary part of any kind of reasoning and or functioning of any sort of human existence? To the trained scientific mind, that seems like bullshit, but you'd be amazed at how useless science is when talking belief.
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