Klątwa wiedzy

Indigenous people looked up at the stars and created their own unique constellations. I am blind to their constellations and unable to see the sky without the constellations of our culture. When I look at the sky, my focus is drawn to the symbols I know. I have defined this aspect of reality and therefore changed my experience of it. Language has a similar effect on our perceptions of reality. When we acquire language, we cease to see reality as it really is, and we see our symbols of it instead. For example, when you use the word “tree,” do you recall a photographic image of a specific tree, of do you imagine a more generalized, symbolic tree? Many people are so disconnected from nature that all trees tend to look alike. Consequently, few people ever really see a tree.

The important part of communication isn`t what is said, but what the audience hear.

The result is an ethnocentric viewpoint. Lacking exposure to other cultures and viewpoints, they understand only the code of conduct of their own culture and see it as the only way to do things. They interpret reality in black-and-white terms, believing the answers must be either this or that, based on their cultural background.

With role-playing, a black-and-white view of issues, and lacking a mature sense of case and effect, the mythical worldview is typically associated with gods and strong opinions of right and wrong. While younger kids tend to perceive reality in very magical terms, kids of this age perceive reality in more mythical terms. For example, while a younger child might imagine he can make a picture of a candy bar magically turn into a real one, an older child might be motivated to pray for one instead, perhaps imagining that if he behaves well then he will be rewarded.

W ten sposób dzieci podświadomie przyswajają sobie maniery i przekonania członków rodziny. Nie pamiętamy jak nauczyliśmy się tego ale większość naszych dorosłych zachowań powodowana jest tymi mocno w nas osadzonymi programami. Uważamy się za myślących, jednak nasze zachowania dowodzą, że jesteśmy automatami wyzwalającymi w danych warunkach dane reakcje zgodnie z zapisanymi w nas instrukcjami.

In the early 1980s, two medical researchers from Perth, Australia, made an astonishing discovery: Ulcers are caused by bacteria. The researchers, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, identified a tiny spiral-shaped type of bacteria as the culprit. (It would later be named Helicobacter pylori). The significance of this discovery was enormous: If ulcers were caused by bacteria, they could be cured. In fact, they could be cured within a matter of days by simple treatment with antibiotics.

The medical world, however, did not rejoice. There were no celebrations for Marshall and Warren, who had almost single-handedly improved the health prospects of several hundred million human beings. The reason for the acclaim was simple: No one believed them.

There were several problems with the bacteria story. The first problem was common sense. The acid in the stomach is potent stuff – it can, obviously, eat through a thick steak, and it’s (less obviously) strong enough to dissolve a nail. It was ludicrous to think that bacteria could survive in such an environment. It would be like stumbling across an igloo in the Sahara.

The second problem was the source. At the time of the discovery, Robin Warren was a staff pathologist at hospital in Perth; Barry Marshall was a thirty-year-old internist in training, not even a doctor yet. The medical community expects important discoveries to come from Ph.D.s at research universities or professors at large, world-class medical centers. Internists do not cure diseases that affect 10 percent of the world’s population.

The final problem was the location. A medical researcher in Perth is like a physicist from Mississippi. Science is science, but, thanks to basic human snobbery, we tend to think it will emerge from some places but no others.

Marshall and Warren could not even get their research paper accepted by a medical journal. When Marshall presented their findings at a professional conference, the scientists snickered. One of the researchers who heard one of his presentations commented that he “simply didn’t have the demeanor of a scientist”.

The mental resistance to new ideas is partly due to the fact that they have to displace established ideas. New facts are not usually accepted unless they can be correlated with the existing body of knowledge; it is often not sufficient that they can be demonstrated on independent evidence. Therefore premature discoveries are usually neglected and lost. An unreasoning, instinctive mental resistance to novelty is the real basis of excessive scepticism and conservatism.

Little is known about him from twenty to forty, but there is no doubt that he passed in those days for an ignorant man. The only language he knew was Dutch—that was an obscure language despised by the cultured world as a tongue of fishermen and shop-keepers and diggers of ditches. Educated men talked Latin in those days, but Leeuwenhoek could not so much as read it and his only literature was the Dutch Bible. Just the same, you will see that his ignorance was a great help to him, for, cut off from all of the learned nonsense of his time, he had to trust to his own eyes, his own thoughts, his own judgment. And that was easy for him because there never was a more mulish man than this Antony Leeuwenhoek!

Hitler i jego instruktorzy znają psychologię chłopców – wykorzystują każdy instynkt, każdą wykluwającą się emocję, by wlać dusze nazistowskich chłopców w formy, w których niedługo zastygną na resztę życia.