Building a Better World Through Tolerance and Love--"Live and Let Live" Allows All to Thrive

Two years ago I first posted this article about the role of free speech in a democracy. I am reprinting it yet again because the message is needed now more than ever. "Live and Let Live" is a meme that is absolutely central to a functioning democracy. Every American citizen is entitled by the law of this land to hold and express their opinions. It is only through exchange of information and assistance that the big jobs get done. Read on for the why's and how's:

The Simple Explanation's theory of memes uses the term "meme" to stand for a belief or a tidbit of knowledge. These memes are passed around to our friends like trading cards--most of our close friends hold the same meme cards we do; that's why they are our friends. The more memes you hold in common with someone else, the more you like them. The opposite is also true--we have a difficult time relating to people who hold a different set of memes.

Here is the bottom-line of the previous Apocalyptic Visions article:

The Simple Explanation suggests that "live and let live" would be a great meta-meme for everyone to adopt. If we could appreciate the fact that each of us has a unique perspective, then perhaps we could allow each other to hold the memes that make the most sense for our lives. This is my meme chord; that is your meme chord. If I don't like your meme chord then I can talk it over with you and see if we can move our meme chords closer to one another in agreement. If neither of us is able or willing to swap memes with the other, then so be it. Either accept the other person, memes and all, or move on. Find someone else who more closely agrees with your memes. There is enough room in this world for each of us to hold our own chords, but only if "live and let live" is an overarching meme.

We are now in the midst of a social epidemic of intolerance. Intolerance is the opposite of "live and let live." When we are intolerant of others' memes, we are declaring that our memes are correct and their memes are wrong. And then we take it a step further--we refuse to "tolerate" the others' memes. We throw up resistance, we throw up roadblocks, we close our ears and refuse to listen to the other. We do not merely disagree, as reasonable people may do from time to time. 

When we are intolerant, we look for ways to force others to abandon their memes and adopt ours. We shout them down because we feel we are shouting the right memes and theirs are not only wrong, they are evil and have no right to be heard. And once you declare the other people as "evil," it is no longer a disagreement in good faith, but a fight for the soul. "God is on our side, therefore we can do whatever it takes to crush the opposition," is a dangerous and usually delusional meme to hold. And if it entitles the holder to disregard rule of law, then it is not a democratic ideal and it has no place in American politics.

Once words can no longer be exchanged, frustration builds and violence follows. This is what we are seeing now in the U.S.  Free exchange of memes has been thwarted because of intolerance, and intolerance has led to violence. 

Exchange of ideas is the key. You needn't agree with the other person, but you must hear them out. Because, once you agree to sit and exchange ideas and concerns, whether or not you adopt the other's ideas, the very act of hearing each other out creates a shared space that acts as a balm to soothe both your soul and theirs. When you are too angry, frustrated, or afraid to listen to the other, you perpetuate the intolerance that leads to violence. This intolerance is not helpful. 

 Maxine Waters calls followers to adopt intolerance of others' right to disagree. Her call to action in favor of intolerance has now become the norm on the Left. [cnn photo credit]

We hear a lot about the importance of "diversity" nowadays in America. True diversity can only thrive if we allow each other to "live and let live." Diversity allows people to hold their own opinions and beliefs without incurring punishment from either the powerful or the mobs.

When you seek to silence those with whom you disagree, you are not encouraging diversity; you are actually partaking in fascism. Fascism advocates the forced suppression of those who express opposing views. Disagreement, on the other hand, is not forced suppression, it is merely disagreement.  Shouting others down when they have the floor, shunning those with whom you disagree, refusing service in a restaurant to paying customers who voted for a different candidate--this is not the side of the angels, folks. This is not helping us come together to get the job done.

Groupthink Is Counter to Democracy. Censorship Divides.

 Two years ago I wrote this article called "A Simple Explanation of Groupthink." Since that time, groupthink has become the standard of the land. I am reprinting this article with further commentary. Please come to your senses before it's too late. Wake up!

My friend. Consider this article an invitation to take a deep breath and relax a bit. I am writing to you because my heart is saddened by your current level of fear, anger, and confusion. There is a primal level of angst in the land, with ever-deepening divisions. Our political meme chords are hardening into a primitive form of brutish tribalism through the force of rhetoric and propaganda. If we aren't careful, violence will increasingly replace vitriol. My friend, this is not the American way. 

*In the two years since this article was posted, riots, burning, and looting have raged across America. Divisions have widened to the point where neighbors can no longer speak to one another. Social media censorship has ensured that people can not read each other's posts, preventing us from widening our range of thinking and stopping us from discussing important social and political events with one another.

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." [Charles Mackay, 1841, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds"]

Negative effects of groupthink on teamwork, Dale Carnegie Institute

Let's talk about "groupthink" for a minute. Groupthink is when individuals stop thinking for themselves and adopt memes that are held and propagated by the group as a whole. Grouppthink occurs, for example, when you read an article or a facebook post and believe everything in it, no matter how outrageous, and then endorse it with a thumbs-up and send it on to your friends. Contrast that with coming across the same information and weighing it rationally, using due diligence to verify claims and consider opposing arguments, and then endorsing or rejecting the memes, irrespective of who said what. Not nearly as much fun, is it?

Groupthink memes rely upon mass delusion for energy; and the end result is never good. Oftentimes, groupthink memes would be literally unthinkable if it were not for the influence of the group over personal will. Mob violence is a perfect example of groupthink--no one in their right mind would pick up a stone and throw it at their neighbor for no reason whatsoever... were it not for the fact that twenty other neighbors were already throwing stones at the poor soul.

The particular groupthink I'm concerned with in this article has to do with your enthusiastic endorsement of political and economic philosophies you know nothing about in your effort to speak truth to power. Have you actually studied history? Do you understand the effect of various political and economic memes on societies in the past or halfway around the world? Do you have a working knowledge of economics? I think it's safe to say that few of my friends have studied these subjects in depth. (Of course, out there in the larger webiverse I know a few of you have, so don't take offense.) All I'm saying is now that social media and the web have given voice and influence to any fool with a cellphone, it's more important than ever to do your research. 

*The strategy currently adopted by social media is not to give voice and influence to "any fool with a cellphone" as I originally put it, but to only give some fools with cellphones voice and influence in order to slant the coverage of current events. Over the past couple of years social media has decided to actively block everyone the elite at the top disagree with, including yours truly on occasion. Even mainstream media openly blocks and slants coverage of the news to ensure compliance with elitist goals. If I were to chat with my neighbors about current events and politics, at least half of them would have never even heard the topics I'm raising. 

Now, let's imagine our country is a large organization that needs to function well in order to survive and prosper so that we all may reap the benefits. Surely, that is a goal we all share.

*We all share the desire to be safe in our homes, to prosper at work, to freely assemble with others, and to speak our minds without being hit on the head with a brick.

Consider the following advice for overcoming groupthink, from Dale Carnegie Institute's article, "The Curse of Teamwork: Groupthink":

• Create an organizational environment where individuals can freely voice their ideas, challenges, and concerns. Individuals must feel comfortable with taking interpersonal risks, admitting hesitations, and challenging one-another. Absent an inclination to avoid conflict, a team can easily discuss and debate different perspectives.
• Think about the right information required to make sound decisions. Consider the strongest counter-argument to every idea.
• Do not suppress disagreements or dominate the dissenters. Carefully examine the reasons and implications of alternate viewpoints.

Now think about this: have you really stopped to consider the other side of the political debate? Have you really tried to see why half of your neighbors disagree with your position? Can you explain their memes in non-inflammatory language? In other words, do you understand what the adversary is saying and the facts behind their claims? If not, why not?  (One reason why not, as we all know by now, is due to the ideological filters social media platforms put on posts to keep us sorted into tidy categories. Another, self-selected, filter is the one-sided news channel you choose to watch.)

My brother, Dr. Bill Puett, used to share the following advice about critical thinking with his departing Philosophy students. Sounds a lot like Carnegie's anti-groupthink lesson.

"Other than your living a loving and compassionate life, I wish for you more than anything that you become autonomous. Be fully informed on all important matters and apply critical thinking before making choices. Regard no one as an authority, challenge all beliefs, but listen to others before reaching decisions. Before offering criticism, know an opposing position so well that you can argue it better than the opponent proposing it. In so doing, you may risk your own position. ..."

I think it is time for us to settle down and return to reason. Emotion, particularly fear and righteous indignation, is not getting us anywhere except upset. A steady diet of inflammatory rhetoric is ruining our faith in the nation. And it's not doing any favors for your health or mental well-being, either. Step One is stop feeding the fear. 

*Hate and anger cannot build; they can only destroy. Hatred tears down and rips apart; love builds and brings together. Do not expect that building a better America will rise from the ashes of hatred; it will not. Hatred brings ruination, less security, less prosperity, and ever increasing divisions that cannot heal. Look inside yourself--are you operating out of Hatred?

"We go out of our course to make ourselves uncomfortable; the cup of life is not bitter enough to our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put into it, or conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves at, which would never exist if we did not make them." [Charles Mackay, 1841, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds"]

Remember the Simple Explanation's Golden Rule:

Our job is to reach out to others with love, information, and assistance to build something greater than ourselves.

***************

Cyd Ropp has a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from The University of Memphis. Her specialty is meta-level analysis of ideological divides and their ultimate resolution.

 Buy the Simple Explanation book by clicking here.

A Simple Explanation of Panspermia--Reprinted article by Keith Scott-Mumby

The following article was written by Keith Scott-Mumby for his alternative healthcare blog. It's an excellent discussion of the power of life forms to survive and spread. He calls it:

Life is Just Awesome!

The thing about life is that it’s… well, living. You might think it’s easy to kill things but not so. Life is prodigious in its powers of replication. Life gets everywhere and THRIVES, no matter what you do.

It takes some seriously sick filth, like man-made chemicals, to harm life.

Even if you wipe out a generation or a strain, SOMETHING will survive. DNA is a mysterious but powerful messenger. It can survive in outer space and still be viable.

That’s why some of us think the earth was colonized from space. It’s a model called “Panspermia” (life everywhere). All that evolutionary hooey, from Charles Darwin and his groveling apologists, like Richard Dawkins, almost certainly never happened. There is no EVIDENCE of evolution, which is curious if it did happen. Where are the intermediate giraffes, with longer and longer necks? There aren’t any. None!

Lack of such evolving life forms is virtual proof that evolution did NOT take place, don’t you think? Consider this quote from Sir Fred Hoyle…

I don’t think he necessarily meant God. But intelligence is something we all participate in (well, except politicians). We are, all of us, the creative force in the universe.

But how did life get through space: no air, no water, no food and very little or no gravity? Plus space is very fierce in the radiation present, such as deadly UV light from the Sun. It could fry a human in minutes and astronauts have to be protected from it.

I repeat: life is prodigious in its powers. Praise be to the Creator of All!

Believe it or not, the first space travelers were seeds. As long ago as 1946, NASA launched an ex-German V-2 rocket carrying maize seeds to observe how they’d be affected by radiation. Since then, the scientific community has learned a great deal about the effects of the space environment on seed germination, metabolism, genetics, biochemistry and even seed production.

Take the 2008 EXPOSE experiment, in which plants were stranded in space for over 550 days, OUTSIDE the International Space Station (ISS), in dead space. 

Astrobiologists David Tepfer and Sydney Leach masterminded research into how seeds would do back on Earth after spending extended periods on the International Space Station. The goal was to understand not only the effects of long-term radiation exposure, but a bit about the molecular mechanisms of those effects.

How Does Nature Do It?

Seeds possess a couple of remarkable traits that Tepfer and Leach hypothesized would give these pioneering seeds more than a fighting chance.

First, they contain multiple copies of important genes – what scientists call redundancy. Genetic redundancy is common in flowering plants, especially food products, such as seedless watermelon and strawberries. If one genetic copy is damaged, there’s still another available to do the job.

Secondly, seed coats contain chemicals called flavonoids that act as sunscreens, protecting the seed’s DNA from damage by ultraviolet (UV) light. On Earth, our planet’s atmosphere filters out some harmful UV light before it can reach us. But in space, there is no protective atmosphere.

The researchers stored the seeds in a single layer on the outside of the ISS behind a special kind of glass that let in ultraviolet radiation only at wavelengths between 110 and 400 nanometers. This made DNA very vulnerable, because it readily absorbs UV radiation in this wavelength range. 

Testing the ability of life to survive OUTSIDE the space station

A second, identical set of seeds was also on the ISS, but shielded completely from UV radiation. The purpose of this experimental design was to observe the effects of UV radiation.

Tepfer and Leach chose tobacco seeds and Arabidopsias, a small plant often used in biology models. Both have a redundant genome and therefore good odds for survival. They also included a genetically engineered variety of tobacco with an antibiotic resistance gene added; the plan was to later test this gene in bacteria and determine if there was any damage. 

In addition to normal Arabidopsis, they sent up two genetically modified strains of the plant that contained low or no UV-protective chemicals in their seed coat. 

Finally, they also included purified DNA and purified flavonoids. This gave the researchers a wide range of scenarios by which to understand the effects of space on the seeds.

Lastly, back on Earth, the researchers performed an experiment back in the lab that exposed Arabidopsis, tobacco and morning glory seeds to very high doses of UV light for only a month.

After all these various exposure conditions, how well did the seeds grow?

The seeds that had been shielded in the lab did the best, with more than 90 percent of them germinated. That’s the benchmark. Next came the seeds that had been exposed to UV radiation for one month in the laboratory, with better than 80 percent germinating.

For the space-traveling seeds, more than 60 percent of the shielded seeds germinated. A mere 3 percent of space UV-exposed seeds did.

Now 3% may not sounds very much. But it’s actually brilliant. It’s doubtful if 3% of turtle young or acorns actually survive. But that’s not a problem because nature is so profligate: a single plant or organism may produce millions of spores or seeds. 

A single human ejaculation releases 100 – 250 million sperm (Live Science website), yet it only takes one sperm to make a baby.

In terms of test species, the Arabidopsis seeds did not survive once planted in soil. Tobacco plants, however, showed reduced growth but that growth rate recovered in subsequent generations. Tobacco has a much heartier seed coat and a more redundant genome, which may explain its apparent survival advantage.

When the researchers plugged the antibiotic resistance gene into bacteria, they found it was still functional after its trip to space. That finding suggests it’s not genetic damage that’s making these seeds less viable. Tepfer and Leach attributed the reduced germination rate to damage to other molecules in the seed besides DNA, maybe the proteins. 

A redundant genome or built-in DNA repair mechanisms couldn’t solve that particular problem, so no wonder the Arabidopsis plants didn’t survive transplanting.

As for the ground experiments, the researchers found that radiation damage is dose-dependent – the more radiation the seeds received, the worse their germination rate.

[These particular researchers probably knew nothing about the phenomenon of hormesis, in which tiny doses of radiation make an organism bigger and more vigorous]

So, YES: space is a very hostile environment and bordering on lethal to life. But not quite. Even if only a few viable organisms get through, colonization is possible.

And maybe somewhere, in the great depths of the heavens, there could be a wandering sperm cell, encased and safe, that bumps into an equally viable human egg, and a baby is born… on Planet Zod!

I’m not trying to spin a wildly improbable religious story, just a fun dream.

But it is possible. Are you ready for the facts, Spielberg?

Growing the Edge 2: 21st Century mindset and how to adopt it. YouTube program appearance.

 Cyd was a panelist on a brand new program called "Growing the Edge" on a brand new channel devoted to consciousness and evolving a more enlightened workplace and society. It just so happens that several of the panelists were also torus-lovers.   

Check it out! I'll probably be a regular on the show, if I continue to jell with these folks.

These were the panelists:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/eva-pascual-4789941a4/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/affikhan/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinadryza/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cyd-ropp-530175a/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/hmsadeghijd/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunnermandy/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/positivdisruptr/

Take a Look at the article on my New Gnostic Gospel blog--"Our Aeonic Inheritance"

I just posted a nifty article on my other blog, titled "Our Aeonic Inheritance." If you're curious about human nature and Gnostic cosmology, you may find the article interesting.

Here's a sample from "Our Aeonic Inheritance," by Cyd Ropp

In my imagination, the Pleroma sits in its hierarchy like a pyramidal-shaped slime mold. The fascinating thing about slime molds is that they are comprised of single-celled organisms that work as a fully integrated whole, moving as one, simultaneously sharing information and nutrition across the entirety. “All for one and one for all” is their motto. Like the slime mold, the Pleroma is both a singular unit as well as a collection of individuals with one mind, singing one song, dreaming one dream.

The dream of the Pleroma is that place we humans recognize as Paradise. In this dream of theirs, there are the “figures” which preceded us and our world. The Pleroma dreams of our entire cosmos, including everything and everyone in it, with all of the figures imagined in the same manner a human filmmaker imagines the characters and settings of a movie long before the stage is built, characters cast, and the play enacted and filmed. And the way the Paradise is constructed and populated is by the aeons (Totalities)  combining their abilities and talents to make up novel combinations of themselves.

According to the Tripartite Tractate, we are the “living figures” that represent in this material world the figures and forces of the Pleroma, and we are patterned directly from them and we are their “fruit.”

Click here to read the full article