They learn to obey mommy and daddy (or whomever the child-rearers are in their lives), and to transfer those patterns of obedience on to and to adopt them from individuals and institutions of all sorts: schools, churches, teams, states, media, politicians, leaders, prophets, bosses, generals, traditions, cultures.

The Bellamy salute, Occupied Hawai'i, 1941

Precious few seem to ever learn the value of questioning everything put to them by these people and institutions, to deconstruct the self-perpetuating mind-viruses they transmit, and to confront the truths of our common reality for themselves. Instead, too many fall into those patterns and enact those little mental programs.

The most successful of these programs ultimately include directives to retransmit them to others — and to shun those who refuse to absorb and adopt them.

“Christmas is the most important holiday of the year” is a proposition many would agree with — despite the fact that “Christmas” and “holiday” are mere social constructs built upon thousands of years of mindless obedience to unfounded tradition. Their value emerges not from any aspect or quality of the world as it is, but rather from the social acceptance gained by going along with and acting according to the proposition.

“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country” — a mind-control slogan if there ever was one, cloaking the interests of power elites to enslave and exploit their subjects in wars for profit, while invoking “goodness” and “community” in the form of the imaginary construct called “one’s country”. Militarism reached its pinnacle thus far in the 20th century, and one can only hope that the mountains of millions of corpses it generated will be its only legacy into the future. I can’t help but wonder, though, if we as a species, as a global culture, have been at all purged of the tendencies and weaknesses which led to all that slaughter.

Indeed, as I look around, I seriously doubt it.

Mind you, writing your own programs for life in this world we share is hard. Nobody teaches you this in school. In some ways, it is a skill that can’t be taught in traditional fashion, since metaprogramming the human biocomputer is not something which lends itself well to being broken down into the component bits that the Prussian-model education system we are all so many of us are products of requires.

Be born to Muslim parents, and you’re expected to be a Muslim. Grow up in Pittsburgh, and you’re expected to be a Steelers fan. Become a citizen of Norway by accident of birth, and you’re expected to self-identify as “Norwegian” for the rest of your life. Be born to “democracy”, and you’re expected to be a voter. And on and on.

Violate these patterns, and those around you brand you odd.

And this is considered “normal”.

Normal people scare me.