"paradigm" is a pretty fancy word for what amounts to mob mentality
I dont think that mob mentality is always a bad thing. As a species it has behooved us to maintain a certain level of conformity, otherwise the population would disperse or react differently to threats and not remain cohesive enough to survive. And, as contrarians got weeded out of the population, the tendency toward conformity increased.
Our individualist lifestyle is a luxury that is the result of the fruits of our modern day civilization. This civilization allows us the privilege of being unique and special snowflakes and is the cumulative result of almost two million years of evolution pushing us toward more conformity. It is a bold experiment and I applaud it, but I am given pause when I see the civilizations with the greatest longevity and continous operation (China, for example) having an emphasis on subsumption of the self to the group. I further see how individualists tend to regress toward the mean of mob mentality on sites like /b/.
It may very well be that the urge to conform is ingrained too deeply to be done away with, and while it can be harmful taken to the extreme, so can extreme individualism -- also known as sociopathy.
Personally, I think a happy medium between the mobs torching the castle and Patrick Bateman on a sex-fueled killing spree is following a golden rule of acting as you wish to be treated and doing what your parents always told you were basic rules of politeness. The rest is culture-specific aftermarket garbage and is usually fueled by some sort of ideology or religion without an empirical basis for its claims. But the Golden Rule and not being a di
ck to strangers: I think that's more or less universal.
Author
Topic: Beefy - Nov 02 2009 (Read 13211 times)