If I hide in a rock cleft of a remote mountain, forage roots for my meals, and don’t speak to another human, will I then . . . yet . . . be an independent thinker?

No. I would become a lunatic, a crazy person, seeking human society with every breath of my lungs.

And so, we accept who we are.

Humans are social beasts, like horses.

If you exclude a horse from horse “society”, the mother keeping him for a few moments from joining the herd, there is exquisite pain for the foal. The foal adjusts his ways and becomes more amenable in groups.

So with people. We are made to share food, inventions, ideas. Caught off guard enjoying some roasted beetle grubs by the community fire, the cave person encounters a new idea. Does she grab hold of the idea, assess it, and look at all angles before inserting it into her brain, that this idea is TRUE?

Certainly, there are some ideas, perhaps too unusual to be ignored, or too infrequent to have a well-worn route along neurons to be inserted into the brain, that she will take hold of before it enters her consciousness. She will evaluate, re-examine. Some ideas she will toss.

But many, many ideas slip by her unnoticed, as she is distracted with the latest joke and a swig of fermented taro root. Sure. That idea sounds fine. And now she believes it too. We believe each other. We are social animals.

And this is how culture is born.

A beautiful thing is culture, which is defined as a set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices. It is amazing to see the variety of costumes, foods, and yes, ideas that a community of people who live in proximity share

Except when we are wrong.

Time WILL expose the ideological rot within our culture, that is currently hidden, like a large piece of lettuce covering rotten meat.

Germans shouting allegiance to Hitler was cultural rotten meat in the brain.

And every culture has widespread beliefs that are, well, wrong. Including MY culture, including YOURS. Including MY brain, including YOURS.

Knowing that some of the stuff that YOU believe is a rotten, filthy mess is a good place to start in the goal of healthy ideology.

Time to dig out the old ears, polish ’em up, reattach them, and give them a listen. How may you be wrong?

And the wider question, which is just as important but crucial to reevaluate and assess ideas before we absorb them unthinkingly is, “How may the majority of people that you currently listen to and trust, your culture, be wrong?”

Truly independent thinking perhaps begins here in the nuanced tightrope of understanding what my trusted group believes and what the OTHER group believes. Do you have time to truly listen, to re-evaluate, to toss some of your OWN cultural rot?

Freedom begins here.

. . . some of the people of Jerusalem said . . . “And yet we know where this man came from. The Messiah* is going to come out of nowhere. Nobody is going to know where he comes from.” The Message

Lord, help us not to be like the people in the quote above, who demonstrate ancient rot in the brain. They do not ask questions, or clarify. In fact, they were wrong. They are confident and wrong. The Messiah was to come from Bethlehem and was not simply to “come out of nowhere”, their own scriptures attest.

Help us, Jesus, to ask a question instead of asserting confidently, pulling out bits of our rotten brains for all to see. Help us Lord, to ask you and our neighbor questions, and to begin to learn to listen. Holy Spirit, would you gently nudge and remind us to consider your presence increasingly more often before we speak, today? And help us to keep our ears screwed on tight, we pray.

Blogpost Footnotes

*The Messiah is the foretold savior or liberator