Parasitic Ideas and the Endarkenment make us the victims of our own successful civilization [View all]
I've been thinking a lot lately about ideas which are parasitic. Parasitic ideas are ones that are inherently anti-civilization, but they can only take root where a successful society has made their absurdity almost invisible.
Like the parasitic idea of anti-vaccine mania. Through thousands of years, our understanding of disease has slowly increased, slowly slowly, through painstaking work and careful documentation. We only figured out the germ theory of diseases about 150 years ago. And then, in the 20th century, we took all of that information and began devising ways to manage our immune systems to the point where horrible, life-threatening and -altering diseases were averted and almost wiped out. Suddenly, childhood was rid of a ton of the misery and death and fear and suffering that had always attended it.
And then naive people were born into this relative utopia, grew up without suffering through measles, whooping cough, polio, etc. looked around and decided that they weren't going to have their children vaccinated. This is an idea borne of ignorance - of not having any visceral feeling for either what vaccines can help us avoid, or how well they have worked.
The same thing with Libertarians, who seem to have been born into this wonderful society we have, built on the sweat and cooperation and taxes of millions before them (and also slave labor), opened their kitten-like eyes and decided that they didn't have to participate. "I want to live like a parasite in this infrastructure which is already all around me and for which I have no clue how hard it was to create, how long it took to develop, and which I haven't taken a minute to think about how much I value." They live with the naive fantasy that they don't have to pay taxes, and everything will just continue to be great, tra-la, because they are ignorant fools.
Trickle Down Economics also falls into this category. The societies of the 60s and 70s, having a thriving middle class built up by progressive taxation, strong labor policy, and a social safety net, were charmed into thinking that everything was going to be OK, even as the rich and powerful dismantled all three of those things. With no regard for the massive fight and sacrifice labor leaders put in to getting us there, we allowed the very basis for our pretty great society to be attacked and start to crumble.
"Voter Fraud" is another one. We have democratic elections where more people's votes count than ever before, thanks to all of the people who fought to expand the franchise - to women, to minorities, to younger people. But the rich and powerful don't like democracy, because their greedy ideas can be voted down. So, while committing election fraud with one hand to subvert the will of the people, they scream about non-existent voter fraud with the other. And people ignorantly let them take our rights away.
Every victory that we achieve as a species, as a society, can be taken away from us when that victory (and the struggles behind it) fade from the popular memory. We are, as species, remarkably easy to con into throwing away our advantages in fits of naive ignorance.
Other parasitic ideas:
killing off Social Security, because the problem of old people in dire poverty doesn't seem to be around anymore.
killing the EPA, because the air and water seem clean enough and regulations interfere with profits
etc.
I leave it as an exercise of the reader to reflect on which groups of voters are most susceptible to Parasitic Ideas.
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