Generational Dynamics World View

[Bob Butler 54]

A major part of my system is world views.  How does a person look at the world?  With it comes values.  To perpetuate the culture, what should one strive for?  With scale, there is also culture.  Many people sharing a world view and values becomes a culture.  The system studies how cultures change and progress.

There are various types of world views.

I once got into an exchange with a fundamentalist (so called) Christian.  Everything said by the Bible was held to be true.  You had to converse with him in biblical speak, featuring numbers referencing specific quotes.  An argument based on any other perspective bounced off.  It just did not register on his brain.  As a result, I dusted off an adult version of my old Sunday school nun’s teachings in order to converse.  Even then he cherry picked.  The Bible is a historical document written over many years.  You can find in it anything from an eye for an eye to turning the other cheek.  He carefully picked to justify racism.  That was a feature of the Jewish culture at one point long ago.  Behold the land of milk and honey.  Kill the men.  Enslave the women.  The Jewish way at the time.  The holy way to this guy.

This would be one of many variants of a religious world view.  Others are far more to be respected.  Much wisdom of the ages is held in various religious systems, and much that is obsolete.  God is considered to be perfect and unchanging, yet He can only be as advanced as man has gotten to that point.

I got into another exchange with a supposed communist.  In order to deal with him, I would have to quote Marx and the policies of Russia during their communist period.  This was eerily reminiscent of quoting the Bible.  Fortunately, I had spent a lot of my college electives chasing Marx and Russian history.  Otherwise, other perspectives bounced off.  They were not considered.  Still, you are hardly expected to win on somebody else’s playing field.  When dealing with a tight system like that, someone can stick with the program and reject everything else.

This would be an example of a political mind set, dedicated to preserving one culture, one political way of looking at things.  You see political mind sets commonly on the T4T forums, especially the red and blue.

I try to adhere to a scientific mind set.  You learn from the world by observing the world.  If a theory is found to not compare well with reality, you either improve your theory or abandon it.  Attacking the observations is expected, or the logic of the theory, but not insults as the primary defense or ignoring criticism.  That is just evidence that you cannot defend your theory.  Meaningful criticism is a chance to learn, to improve one’s theory.

Naturally, I form opinions on who has which type of mind set and values based on how they behave.

The question is what one does if someone has a partisan political mind but presents his ideas a scientific theory without honoring the scientific rules?  If he ignores criticism, hurls insults, refuses observations and clings to his preferred dogma, you can tell what sort of world view he has.  That is common among internet political partisans.  Very common.  The question is what to do about it?