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I think this correlation is related to causation. I think there are registers in people's minds that are simply occupied. Addicts occupy their predisposition t

I think this correlation is related to causation. I think there are registers in people's minds that are simply occupied. Addicts occupy their predisposition to addiction with a single or ever changing way of neglecting their responsibilities and relationships and health, based on simple earliest exposure. Susceptible people occupy their predisposition to susceptibility with religion or fervent ideology, the "choice" being simply the earliest exposure. Whichever one shows up first occupies that part of their mind. No different than a simpler organism impressing who its mother and caretaker is.

vitiral 5y ago
Reducing the actions of people to objects or "simpler organisms" is rarely a helpful concept. Often people are much more complicated than our reductions of them.
- vmception 5y ago
  I should wrote "analogous" instead of "no different", as analogies compare dissimilar things with common attributes, and could provide the same introspective capabilities without the easy ego based rebuttals There aren't enough differences for me to entertain the idea of backtracking though
Growling_owl 5y ago
> I think there are registers in people's minds that are simply occupied. I think this is the case, anecdotally I noticed that if you are a sports fan, then the "us versus them" rhetoric works much less, or at least less than you'd expect in such people. At least for domestic politics, that's because you already get your dose of "us versus them" from some other domain in your life. Same for religion which is the main topic covered in the article: People who are religious are less likely to fall prey of cults. Religious people are less likely to elevate "false prophets" such as actors, musicians, rockstars and also the new phenomenon represented by technoutopian cult leaders such as Elon Musk or Elizabeth Holmes.
dclowd9901 5y ago
What a condescending and misanthropic view of people. So we're just paramecia with "registers" waiting for occupation. As with anything, I think the real answer is much more nuanced. 1) This article is making the case that this behavior is universal, when there is no evidence of that. As always has been, there are subsects of any ideology that are ravenous in their dogma. They are always the loudest and get the most attention, because their actions are so extreme. It's selection bias by the media, who (wouldn't you know it) are the same folks making the assertion that political religiosity has supplanted deified religiosity. 2) If there's something resembling a "trend" happening around peoples' emotional investment in politics, it's likely around the fact that politics is increasingly prodding itself into peoples' lives. At the very least, if I travel abroad, and we have a president like Trump, I look like a fucking idiot. That sucks. At the worst, I'm a woman or minority whose livelihood is negatively affected constantly by political footballing. This has nothing to do with an absence of god, but everything to do with a real, quantifiable affect on peoples' lives. How can you expect people, secular or not, to put up with the state of social and political conversation as it exists today? If they're staunch conservatives, how can they put up with a clear wind blowing in the direction of socialism? If they're democrats, how can they put up with a clearly obstructionist and crooked counter party? Reducing all of that to computer parlance and the most basic biologies undermines the real problems that people are dealing with.
- vmception 5y ago
  Because they're "staunch conservatives" or "democrats", as you wrote, because thats what they were exposed to first, not because they had an array of choices set in front of them with no external influence and said "that makes more sense" The same goes with religion The same goes with addicts
- mrfusion 5y ago
  I don’t think anyone judges you because of who the president is.
bdv5 5y ago
Starting conditions matter but all kinds of forces (and they are ever changing) exist and act upon the chimp mind as it moves through the jungle that is life. Where it ends up is highly unpredictable. So we get a chimp troupe like China were all the chimps appear to have the same programming or like US where chimps magically get polarized into exactly 2 camps on any issue or an Israel which due to the unique challenges it faces ends up with a knesset with more ideologies than anyone can keep track off. Starting conditions are only one variable in a very complex equation.

vitiral 5y ago

Reducing the actions of people to objects or "simpler organisms" is rarely a helpful concept. Often people are much more complicated than our reductions of them.

vmception 5y ago
I should wrote "analogous" instead of "no different", as analogies compare dissimilar things with common attributes, and could provide the same introspective capabilities without the easy ego based rebuttals There aren't enough differences for me to entertain the idea of backtracking though

Growling_owl 5y ago

> I think there are registers in people's minds that are simply occupied. I think this is the case, anecdotally I noticed that if you are a sports fan, then the "us versus them" rhetoric works much less, or at least less than you'd expect in such people. At least for domestic politics, that's because you already get your dose of "us versus them" from some other domain in your life. Same for religion which is the main topic covered in the article: People who are religious are less likely to fall prey of cults. Religious people are less likely to elevate "false prophets" such as actors, musicians, rockstars and also the new phenomenon represented by technoutopian cult leaders such as Elon Musk or Elizabeth Holmes.

dclowd9901 5y ago

What a condescending and misanthropic view of people. So we're just paramecia with "registers" waiting for occupation. As with anything, I think the real answer is much more nuanced. 1) This article is making the case that this behavior is universal, when there is no evidence of that. As always has been, there are subsects of any ideology that are ravenous in their dogma. They are always the loudest and get the most attention, because their actions are so extreme. It's selection bias by the media, who (wouldn't you know it) are the same folks making the assertion that political religiosity has supplanted deified religiosity. 2) If there's something resembling a "trend" happening around peoples' emotional investment in politics, it's likely around the fact that politics is increasingly prodding itself into peoples' lives. At the very least, if I travel abroad, and we have a president like Trump, I look like a fucking idiot. That sucks. At the worst, I'm a woman or minority whose livelihood is negatively affected constantly by political footballing. This has nothing to do with an absence of god, but everything to do with a real, quantifiable affect on peoples' lives. How can you expect people, secular or not, to put up with the state of social and political conversation as it exists today? If they're staunch conservatives, how can they put up with a clear wind blowing in the direction of socialism? If they're democrats, how can they put up with a clearly obstructionist and crooked counter party? Reducing all of that to computer parlance and the most basic biologies undermines the real problems that people are dealing with.

vmception 5y ago
Because they're "staunch conservatives" or "democrats", as you wrote, because thats what they were exposed to first, not because they had an array of choices set in front of them with no external influence and said "that makes more sense" The same goes with religion The same goes with addicts
mrfusion 5y ago
I don’t think anyone judges you because of who the president is.

bdv5 5y ago

Starting conditions matter but all kinds of forces (and they are ever changing) exist and act upon the chimp mind as it moves through the jungle that is life. Where it ends up is highly unpredictable. So we get a chimp troupe like China were all the chimps appear to have the same programming or like US where chimps magically get polarized into exactly 2 camps on any issue or an Israel which due to the unique challenges it faces ends up with a knesset with more ideologies than anyone can keep track off. Starting conditions are only one variable in a very complex equation.