Points Of Reference
How our inbuilt tendency to assume everything is normal enables abnormal things to grow
We’re born small, helpless, and without prior knowledge. Children learn about their immediate environment as they grow and they assume that whatever environment they happen to be in is normal. This means that children growing up in cults or within zealously religionist families take their circumstances axiomatically as normal even as wider society considers such norms as aberrant.
We don’t change much as adults. Despite the enormous body of empirical knowledge assembled over the last five hundred years, religionists tend to remain trapped within their belief systems and remain almost entirely ignorant of real-world facts. People growing up in the USA automatically absorb notions about “the greatest nation on Earth” and consistently fail to perceive the astonishing gulf between hyperbole and reality. The British genuinely believe their woefully inadequate National Health Service is “the best in the world.” Moving from delusional beliefs to everyday norms, we assume our current approach to segmenting children by age at school is normal. We think that working five days per week in jobs we hate is normal. We think accumulating ever-more things we don’t really need is normal. Almost everyone, everywhere, carries around mental models that are at…
