do YOU have a dangerous idea?

A friend recently sent me a link to an online discussion at the World Question Center. Their topic for 2006 is ‘What is your dangerous idea?’ In response to this question, prominent philosophically-minded scientists weigh in with their comments on what ideas may be "socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous [..] not because [they] are assumed to be false, but because [they] may be true".

I browsed quickly through the comments. There is a range of opinions across the spectrum from 'science has no chance against religion' to 'there is no God'. There is a lot on similar wishy-washy false dichotomies, but precious little on what is really going on in our daily life.

Robert Schank does write eloquently on failures of the education system:

My dangerous idea is one that most people immediately reject without giving it serious thought: school is bad for kids — it makes them unhappy and as tests show — they don't learn much.

When you listen to children talk about school you easily discover what they are thinking about in school: who likes them, who is being mean to them, how to improve their social ranking, how to get the teacher to treat them well and give them good grades.

[..]

We need to stop producing a nation of stressed out students who learn how to please the teacher instead of pleasing themselves. We need to produce adults who love learning, not adults who avoid all learning because it reminds them of the horrors of school. We need to stop thinking that all children need to learn the same stuff. We need to create adults who can think for themselves and are not convinced about how to understand complex situations in simplistic terms that can be rendered in a sound bite.

Just call school off. Turn them all into apartment houses.


Of course I agree with him. But, 1 out of 50 kids already being homeschooled, this dangerous idea is hardly revolutionary and thus not nearly as dangerous as it perhaps was 20 years ago.

C'mon, don't you guys have anything MORE to say? Anything that is TRULY dangerous, anything that would upset the illusion we live in so much as to draw the incinerating wrath of the Powers To Be?

I have a couple of such ideas to suggest. How about these:

- There are among the rest of us people without conciense , unable to fell genuine emotion and empathy, no remorse or sense of responsibility -- and they do whatever they want, without shame, as long as they can get away with it. These people are called psychopaths, or more recently, socipaths. People who had dealt with such individuals can attest on their destructive effect on every normal aspect of human existence.

- Worse still, our social and polical system has been hijacked by psychopaths from time immemorial. Quoting from Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes (by Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Ph.D.
with commentary and additional quoted material
by Laura Knight-Jadczyk) :

Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of human history, it has affected social, political, and religious movements as well as the accompanying ideologies… and turned them into caricatures of themselves…. This occurred as a result of the … participation of pathological agents in a pathodynamically similar process. That explains why all the pathocracies of the world are, and have been, so similar in their essential properties.

Doesn't this explain almost EVERYTHING that has been going on recently?

You have probably seen the Pentagon Strike video already. After all, this is one of the most widely disseminated pieces of information on the Internet. While it answers a lot of questions some people have, there are money other people who completely reject the information, based solely on an emotional reaction, "I don't believe it! This simply can not happen here, in our country, the freest democracy in the world".

This reaction underscores our very basic desire to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the world is fair, and all people are basically good but sometimes commit commiting bad action because they are mistaking, or ingorant, or are hurting inside.

People's minds are fighting all out against the notions that I put forward above. And when the evidence pointing to the organized psychopathic evil in high places, some say in disdain, 'those conspiracy nuts again'. This has become a derogatory label. Yet, as explained here :

Conspiracy theory is more thoughtful than fearful. The motivations
behind conspiracy theory research are cognitive and social. It is very
much like doing family genealogy. You begin with a few facts. Then you
puzzle out the story, make inferences and hypotheses, and seek further
facts. With help from other people, with good luck, you discover
information that is sometimes difficult to find. A story emerges,
suggesting new facts that should be sought. The satisfaction comes from
finding the facts, constructing the story, and sharing the process and
discoveries with other people.

It appears that conspiracy research has been labeled, marginalized, and often times corrupted precisely because it sometimes hits upon truly DANGEROUS ideas.

The article Evidence That a Frozen Fish Didn't Impact the Pentagon on 9/11 and Neither Did a Boeing 757 takes the reader through just such process of corruption.

In conclusion, this is what I would like to say to the prominent philosophically-minded scientists:

For the idea to be truly dangerous, it must move your very being and really cut through the illusion of our existence. And it must be the hill that you are willing to die on.

Otherwise -- talk is cheap.

Now, DO you have a dangerous idea?

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