joel/is/blogging/now

One of my friends was telling me recently about a book he read where some sociologist or anthropologist said that in EVERY past culture he could find, there were articles of faith/belief which were (1) central to the culture and (2) later proven to be false. (E.g. the local dictator is actually a deity, the world is flat, the sun revolves around the earth, God wants darker-skinned people to be slaves, etc.)

I believe that the dominant sociopolitical culture of the West currently includes a long list of false articles of faith. If a politician or public figure were to step out of line on any ONE of those tenets, he or she would have to be extraordinarily persuasive and charismatic to avoid being easily, automatically marginalized and sent into the weeds. Two or more and that person is pretty well finished with the vast majority of people.

Unfortunately, given that there are currently so many of these false articles of faith, a conscious, thinking, sincere, honest, rational person will almost inevitably fall outside the matrix on at least a couple of those points. As a politician, then, that person would be left with a choice between lying, or being labeled a kook -- and having a majority of people in the mass culture agree that s/he is a kook -- and being therefore unelectable to higher offices. Such a person might squeak by in a local election, or maybe even carry a congressional district, but probably not a state or a nation.

But wouldn't this make ALL of our major elected leaders either dupes, or liars, or both?

Yes, it would.

I could offer a list here of the false tenets of Western culture, but to list them all at once is just asking for trouble, because it would just make ME a kook in the eyes of most any normal or even semi-normal reader, and undermine the one simple point that I wanted to make in this post.

:-)