Yesterday I saw parts I & II of the TV series Why We Hate. It is a documentary television series showing an “exploration into the human condition of hatred […]“, directed by Geeta Gandbhir and Sam Pollard. The series is on the dynamics of hatred and shows a mixture of science and journalism.
These are two professions that will naturally lose face in populist factions. Populist factions that aim to protect against endemic risks may well be a necessary condition for collectivist hate to emerge. So those who believe that science and journalism are necessary for their institutional setting to survive may well feel tugged towards hating populist factions. So much so, in fact, that they begin populist factions themselves. When they do, we will all enter the mad world of scientific and journalist practices that hate their own constitutional values.
I live in a time that might need the ability to build toy worlds that can simulate the dynamics of such madness, I thought, and went to bed.
I awoke with an epiphany. If Gazzaniga is right in that our conscious thought is a result from a whole range of separate types of stories that compete for dominance concurrently and that may become dominant through a history of being selected earlier, then this might indicate how convictions (or factions in our thinking) do emerge in different settings.
What I need now is a mechanism that performs the selection.
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[…] (source) … those who believe that science and journalism are necessary for their institutional structures to survive, feel inclined to hate populist factions. So much so that they start them themselves … and … that our conscious thinking is the result of a whole series of distinct types of stories that simultaneously compete for dominance and that can become more dominant through a history of prior selection … […]