Don’t think you’re being programmed? Are you sure?
Imagine you are at a busy intersection and the lights in all directions suddenly turn green. You know someone else would go running into someone, but do you have the wherewithal to recognize that that someone may well be you? It takes humility to recognize our own weaknesses, but as readers of this site I suspect you’ve got what it takes, after-all there’s not a lot of pandering to be found here. Since pandering is for egotists lack thereof tends to scare them off in short order.
I lived and drove in a third world “left-side” Country where even if there were a stop sign or traffic light nobody would pay any attention to it. Rest assured, the colors on the lights aren’t going to cause them to run into each other.
The same dynamic is at work on the internet. Again, it seems obvious that other people hearing a narrative repeated over-and-over are going to be coerced into a different perspective. It takes humility to recognize that we might be. If I may be so bold, I’ll just say it for sure. We are!
Consider the outrage and concern caused by the alligator that grabbed a child in Orlando. The correlation between that and the Orlando shooting should not be lost on believers. The alligator is a predator, by Darwinists’ own reckoning it has been a predator before humans even existed. Alligators are also native and abundant in Orlando. What’s not native, but is also abundant in Orlando are tourists. See where I’m going with this? We can imagine a day when alligators will stop being predators and when Islamic radicals will be peaceful, but it would be irrational to behave as though that day is now. Nobody that lives in Orlando is going to take a small child into such a place because locals know the hazards of such places. Society in general however does not! Instead we’ve been programmed to believe that Orlando contains a “magic kingdom” where alligators only bite pirates and where terrorists will stop hunting people if we’d only lay down our defenses and welcome them into our homes. As I type it’s being repeated incessantly that the Orlando terrorist is “homegrown” despite his expressed allegiance to Islam, and his trips to Saudi Arabia. We’re being programmed. I am being programmed. Sure I noticed this, and may not be so quick to come in line, but year-after-year this narrative will develop and I can’t pretend that I’m immune to conformity. Wish I were , but that would be irrational too.
“…the only enemy that we see to ‘flight-or-fight’ is a screen full of letters.”
If the way God made us is any indicator, it seems pretty important to recognize that our biology is not equipped to respond to threats such as alligators if we don’t live anywhere near alligators. Our anxiety is stimulated, our flight-or-fight chemicals are secreted, and yet the only enemy that we see to flight-or-fight is a screen full of letters. Commentaries and commentators, how do we protect ourselves and our families from this dangerous alligator? We blame Republicans, we blame the NRA, we blame the peanut gallery. You know what would be more “evolved” of us? It would be more “evolved” for us to blame the predator without allowing our primitive chemical responses to mandate our philosophies. There are no alligators anywhere near my home.
The inclination to believe that we can mix in all the threats to people thousands of miles away with those that are very real to us is arrogant and irrational in and of itself. The consequence of this is that we become incapable of ascribing an appropriate degree of seriousness to things nearer to us. We find people trying to pet Grizzly bears, or slipping off the edge of a cliff that in their skewed perspectives was no threat at all. Can you imagine a Native American not recognizing the lethal hazard of an automobile moving at a high rate of speed? They’d be terrified for good reason, our teenagers, they text and drive. Combine this with the carelessness creating power of popular drugs like THC (marijuana) and most people have completely lost their facility to recognize the threats around them.
In my last post I pointed out how differently a self-sufficient and agricultural population sees things. Play through the outcome in your mind of debutantes with no concept of what it takes to provide a meal for themselves being enthralled with a 24-hour news and entertainment cycle where apes are mostly human, alligators only bite pirates, and a giant snake was found in at least 1 toilet bowl in the world… When they attempt to legislate, vote, or even speak intelligibly… bingo! You get it, that’s exactly what we already have. People too afraid that the temperature may rise 1 degree in the next century and not afraid enough that Iran now has hundreds of billions of dollars to invest in their nuclear program. A society that believes floods, earthquakes, wildfires, and volcanoes are things that we could control if we could all just “get along.”
We humans are so predictable. Remember those images of vacationers playing in the sand in front of a coming Tsunami? I remember as a young child being warned that when the surf pulls back unusually far it’s a sign that a large wave could be coming. That doesn’t do much good though, I must admit, I’d probably have felt “paranoid” to have considered that “old wive’s tale” and would have probably been right there with them.
Our pride is a dangerous thing. Is it worth the risk of being called “chicken little” to say that the sky might be falling? Spiritual people cannot be so fickle. We should and must be aware of the signs of the times. What do they say? They say that the “sky is falling” and the second that happens all of the decisions that society made about all of these different topics will be moot.
Believers, please don’t be swept up with alligators and gorillas and lions and other blatant flukes of nature on the other side of the world when we as a society are deliberately murdering thousands of children every day. That passion you feel for Cecil, that fight/flight response, is meant for the unborn and the born near you. For your neighbors whose names you might not even know. Don’t be programmed like a robot to jump when Fox News says jump. Instead, dedicate your passions to the cause of Christ which are the lost souls. It’s not too late to disconnect from societal programming. It is difficult though.