Thoughts that are not our own.....

I have been thinking for some time now, about the human race's collective inability to step out of the pointless destructive cycles of History. We always repeat the mistakes of our ancestors over and over. Particularly now when there is so much corruption in high places, people seem determined to replace one set of liars with another. The inability to discern truthfulness is widespread.

Equally bad, I think, is the tendency of the common people to want to believe that the elites are good, or noble, or that they care about the ordinary folk. Try this experiment:

Come up to someone you know, and say "We have tracked your ancestors out to five generations, and we have discovered something of note about your great-great-grandfather. Before we tell you what we found, would you prefer that he would have been a commoner, a horse thief, or a King. Please place in order, what you're preferences are, as to what he should have been."

Unerringly, you will find people would prefer that an ancestor be a King first, then a commoner, and lastly, a horse thief.

In reality, they should have put them in the order of commoner, horse thief, then King. Why?

Because Kings murder people routinely to get power and also to stay in power, so they are in general, more unsavory then horse thieves. That's the rational answer. Humans are programmed to believe that Kings are mostly honorable, when usually they are not. This is the glue that binds peoples together into societies, the faith in the sovereign. This observable fact puts these kinds of thoughts into the category of thoughts that are not our own, because the species (not the individual) requires it for social order. Without this (species wide) programming, we would have continual anarchy....