From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Thu May 13 2004 - 04:44:35 BST
Wim and y'all:
Wim said:
If that stat is true (59% of Americans believing Revelations to be a
reliable and literal prediction of global events in the near future), the
problem is not who leads your nation and how he frames foreign policy
issues. A better president wouldn't have much room for manoeuvre in any
other direction. The problem would not even be with one political party. No
political party can ignore that many voters. The problem then is the
irrationality of the average American and the danger of democracy in such a
country.
dmb replies:
Its true that neither party runs candidates that are openly atheist or even
agnostic, the Republican party appeals to religious conservatives so much
that they effectively dominate it. I'd guess that if genuinely liberal
secularists were to become a party of their own, instead of just a faction
within the Democratic party, they'd constitute about 15% or 20% of all
voters. So there is a great deal of democraphic weight to overcome, but as
Wilber's work points out, the more regressive worldviews tend to have less
power than sheer numbers would dictate. But the most important point I'd
like to make is the 59% is higher than we would normally see on the
irrationality scale even for Americans. Its inflated for lots of reasons, I
suppose, but two huge ones spring to mind. There's an old idea in our
culture known as MANIFEST DESTINY, which is basically the belief the
American has a special place in God's heart and will play an important role
in God's plans. (It also served as a handy way to make genocide against the
Indians seem like something noble and divine.) And more specifically there
is a series of wildly popular books about the "end times" by a former
Baptist minister by the name of Tim LaHaye. There are a dozen books in his
"Left Behind" series and he's sold something like 60 million copies. There
is a movie or two as well.
(This particular interpretation of the book of Revelation is actually
derived from a British minister named John Nelson Darby, who traveled in the
US in the 1860s and 70s spreading the idea. Americans had been disappointed
greatly when the world did not end in October of 1844, so Darby was like a
tall, cool drink for some very thirsty people.)
Tell me: how irrational are you Americans really? This 59% must magnify that
problem of irrationality dominating American thinking, doesn't it? If it
would be true, you would have to be able to tell me a lot more statistics of
irrational behaviour by Americans. (People trying to go through the eye of a
needle maybe...?) Or are Americans projecting their irrationality only on
foreign policy and do they behave rationally in most other realms of life??
How does that stat square to Wilber's percentages of people on different
levels of consciousness that we have been discussing before? (See
wilber.shambhala.com/html/interviews/interview1220.cfm/xid,6587424/yid,88470
152 for those who didn't follow that earlier discussion.)
dmb says:
Americans are 59% irrational. This is different from saying 59% of Americans
are irrational. I'm saying that each American is only 41% rational. And by
this I do not mean that each one is rational 41% of the time. I mean that
each and every American utterance is 59% irrational. Every American is more
than half crazy.
But seriously, people who are perfectly rational in one area can also hold
irrational beliefs. In my experience, these are almost always religous
beliefs. Even the nuts who believe in UFOs and such tend to see them in
religous terms and imbue them with religous meaning. But the same ones who
are among that 59% also have jobs and families and otherwise function in a
rational world. And as you may have suspected, and as common sense would
dictate, there is a strong correlation between educational achievement and
the rejection of irrational belief systems. Obviously, education is the key
to solving this kind of problem. I believe that if we it took it seriously
and educated every American to know HOW to think and allowed everyone to go
as far as they wanted to go, most of our major problems would go away and
we'd be knocking down prisons instead of building them.
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