In an article entitled The Collectivist War Against Cultural Heritage July of 2012, Brandon Smith wrote what I consider to be a phenomenal set of thoughts regarding collectivism. I cannot do enough to encourage my readers to read it themselves.
In fact this is the second time I've gone out of my way to refer you to it. The last time was about one year ago.
To Smith's thoughts I will only add what I've found to be an excellent rule of thumb when evaluating movements and their ideas. A good movement will bring along all things. Those are past, present, and future; tradition, reason, and emotions. A bad movement must defy reason by trying to exclude some major part of the human experience. If the preachers of a movement must teach disdain for tradition, shame of the past, and invalidation of strong feelings there is something very very wrong with it.
We are not a species, and indeed no species capable of anything even remotely resembling the cognitive is one that can thrive independently of whole segments of our being. We cannot live entirely in a realm of total newness, divorced of the past.
We can all try to push against our feelings and act contrary to them, but ultimately we can only emotionally destroy ourselves if we persist. Sure, there are cases where people have developed irrational fears they must overcome, but they are overcome through experiences that reveal those fears for what they are, baseless. Most things however that we react to emotionally, we do so for good reason. If that wasn't true we'd be a dysfunctional species that never should have survived as long as we have.
Read Brandon Smith's article and you will see how extremely important it is for us to cling to our heritage, not abandon it, and also how dangerous those lines of thought that tell us otherwise are.
In fact this is the second time I've gone out of my way to refer you to it. The last time was about one year ago.
To Smith's thoughts I will only add what I've found to be an excellent rule of thumb when evaluating movements and their ideas. A good movement will bring along all things. Those are past, present, and future; tradition, reason, and emotions. A bad movement must defy reason by trying to exclude some major part of the human experience. If the preachers of a movement must teach disdain for tradition, shame of the past, and invalidation of strong feelings there is something very very wrong with it.
We are not a species, and indeed no species capable of anything even remotely resembling the cognitive is one that can thrive independently of whole segments of our being. We cannot live entirely in a realm of total newness, divorced of the past.
We can all try to push against our feelings and act contrary to them, but ultimately we can only emotionally destroy ourselves if we persist. Sure, there are cases where people have developed irrational fears they must overcome, but they are overcome through experiences that reveal those fears for what they are, baseless. Most things however that we react to emotionally, we do so for good reason. If that wasn't true we'd be a dysfunctional species that never should have survived as long as we have.
Read Brandon Smith's article and you will see how extremely important it is for us to cling to our heritage, not abandon it, and also how dangerous those lines of thought that tell us otherwise are.
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