Indoctrination

Sometimes, we advise against religious indoctrination simply because we are, ourselves, indoctrinated. So we mechanically accept our conservative values as errors we must put right, because that’s what our rote education made us to accept as true, and that's why we parrot accordingly.

But just like when you query a computer database and a response code pops up to indicate an error, all the machine is saying is that it has been conditioned to carry out a request that it probably wasn’t programmed to execute. And if you still think you could do with that information, you need to think outside the device.

As far as I'm concerned, indoctrination is when you allow notional ideas to override your actual experiences, when you take everything you’re taught for your reality, even when you can’t relate, like today’s progressiveness is coquetting with many to dabble in causes that meant more than what they’ve become, causes they’re only persuaded to join, by those whose livelihoods depend on their outspoken advocacy.

The progressiveness I know, aka open-mindedness, is supposed to inspire a non-judgmental attitude, an appeal to tolerance, not causing you to persecute people who do not agree with you or think outside your box, because that, aside from being dishonest, is making a mockery of what it really and truly means.

If you ask me, no one’s tolerance is as debatable as those who, when hell-bent on demonising a thing, they expect their position to be revered, and if you value your sanity, you dare not disagree or say anything good about that thing.

For instance, if a campaign is intended to brand my crew and I as idiots, anyone who uses their own frame of reference and sees us as not entirely idiots but misconstrued maybe, should be seen and not heard – because they’re perhaps privileged or immune to idiocy, and their indulgence is subversive of the struggle to expose my crew for the idiots we may not even be.

That’s why today, to disagree is to be disagreeable, to assert and aggress, and that’s to make conversations nearly impossible, because soon as the validity of a claim one makes is questioned with sound reasoning, and one has no decent argument left in the armoury, one assails, turning the argument against the messenger’s person and not the message.