How do we go about reinforcing our beliefs and ideas?
An unhealthy scenario is: We reinforce our beliefs and ideas when we're among those who have a limited amount of beliefs and ideas, which means there won't be very many new ideas or beliefs introduced AND this in itself reinforces our beliefs and ideas. In this situation, it's less our beliefs and ideas and actually more the beliefs and ideas of the group...less individual and more group.
A healthy scenario is: We reinforce our beliefs and ideas through proposing our ideas to a group of people, online or offline, and our beliefs and ideas are scrutinized. People challenge them, propose new and better beliefs and ideas, and look for holes in what we've proposed.
IF our beliefs and ideas hold up to scrutiny and are a better explanation over alternative beliefs and ideas, THEN our beliefs and ideas live to see another day and have thus been reinforced. Through the fire of scrutiny they came out as pure gold...more individual thoughts and less group ideas..
It's a very easy trap to fall into:
You walk away from what you felt was a dogmatic and closed-minded, religious community. During this time you read, challenge what you thought you knew, and learn sounder knowledge. It's now been a couple of years and you find a group that is young, but growing and significantly more open-minded than the ideology you left behind. Having had no structure, identity, the feeling of belonging, and like-minded thinking, like what was found in your community, you're eager to volunteer and become a part of this group. Indeed this group promotes logic, reason, science, and encourages debates and even dialogs.
As time goes on you notice that in all the groups of this organization, about 90+ percent of the time, only a dozen or so topics get talked about and rarely topics outside of that circle of topics..
You notice that it has less to do with someone controlling what the group gets to talk about and more to do with the fact that most of the people in each group simply want to limit their discussions to that dozen or so topics..
So there's the appearance of free inquiry and open-mindedness, but,ultimately, there is a significantly LIMITED interest in topics which are sensitive and challenge one's cherished beliefs and assumptions.
I know that there are more group dynamics going on here than this, but this is something that doesn't get brought up much, and it is important to understand why this occurs with otherwise rational people. We may tend to blame this lack of intellectual incentive on the leaders and the organizers, but are we not also to blame? Do we not also sabotage ourselves by our very nature, fears, and thresholds for reality? Religious or secular, do we not tend to irrationally rationalize how its okay to talk about some topics and avoid others..?
