Social Conditioning: Installment 3
How can we tell the degree to which we are a product of Social Engineering? There are several very accurate ways.
Judgmental Reactions
One of the easiest ways to test the degree to which you have been successfully social programmed is to watch your judgmental reactions. When a judgment is cast on someone publicly do you rise to echo it (if this were ancient times, would you start throwing stones when everyone else did)? Socially programmed people tend to do what is popular rather than what is right, even when what is popular is obviously wrong. The extent to which you concur with mass opinion will indicate to a very reliable degree, the extent to which you are a product of successful social engineering.
Challenging Widely Held Beliefs
Another way to know is by determining the degree to which you challenge commonly held beliefs. Are you an independent thinker or do you readily accept commonly held beliefs? You may be an academic and consider yourself an independent thinker by rite of your acute intellectual aptitude and years of university investment marked by advanced degrees. Well-educated you may be, but, in reality, are you merely an astute learner but not actually an independent thinker)? A truly independent thinker would not shrink from this raw reflection, nor from the answer. Often the most educated among us are the most programmed. Schooling does not equate to self determinism (nor does lack of it equate to greater independence).
Listening to your Inner Voice
Another way of assessing the extent of your social programming is to consider the degree to which you listen to your own inner voice. Do you have a highly tuned antenna that guides you reliably most of the time or do you instead tend to look to others to guide your decisions and choices? Do you put more stock in those so called ‘authorities’ than they actually deserve. Granted, there is a time and place for leaders and teachers in our lives. But the best leaders and teachers will give you the best information you can come by and still encourage you to develop and use your own discernment always. The very fact that our culture holds out for research studies in that face of the obvious is quite telling. Sane, clear, intelligent people have an unerring grasp of what is beneficial to life and what is not, without requiring a major research study to corroborate it. Did we need to wait decades to be told that smoking, asbestos and fast food were harmful? Do we need research studies on GMO’s, children’s usage of smart phones and other devices to confirm our intuitive knowing that they are destroying children’s neurological, immunological, emotional, hormonal, and hematological responses? Really? Come on!
There you have three big insights you can use to help you measure your own unwitting acceptance of social programming. From this point you can go about the noble process of removing it.
-Natalia
