Utter Change of Dogma which guides our behavior: 1. Rapid Change
So, basically, your answer to my question "Is it possible to change the opinion of someone living in delusion and dogma?" is "no"?
We're doomed, aren't we?
Fahim,
I've rewritten my post #19 to separate ideas that should stand on their own. I offer an example of an utter switch of a mind from one set of dogma to another. In this case its from evil to good. It's one of the most extreme I can find. It does show that change for the good is possible, even in the worst hard core cases.
So let's look at the mindset of much of Nazi Germany and old Europe it conquered. Over centuries, intolerance was taught and bred into each new generation. Religious intolerance propagated by clerics and rulers in Europe. Then came the French Revolution and the concept of the Rights of Man! Napoleon's army brought this new mindset with his conquering armies throughout Europe.People reluctantly absorbed the new rules as laws but they were not embraced deep in their hearts. This forced equality of the foreigners, the hated Jews, was an the insult to the status quo. There was a brooding and a backlash that was expressed first especially Alsace with the formation of the Antisemite Party, and then in Germany, but the sentiment for payback found favor in much of Europe. The Nazis just expressed these pent up hatred most clearly. It was that the "vermin" contaminating good, noble Ayrian Christian Europe, (Jews, Blacks, Homosexuals and the mentally infirm), where to be expunged from the modern State.
This mindset was not at all new. After all, for hundreds of years, monarchs and prelates had whipped up hysteria against foreigners, especially Jews and Muslims and led Crusades against any "foreign community. The grand crusades would rape and plunder their way through Europe to them do the same to the Muslims in the holy Lands. So Nazi behavior was not new, although it's scale was more massive and the killing more efficient because of industrialization of collection and killing with IBM punch cards, the telephone, trains and concentration camps. When the Nazis invaded new territories, in some cases, the population had already rounded up their own Jews and taken their property even before the Nazi armies arrived! So the mindset of Europe was that of a dogma of xenophobia derision, classifying Jews, blacks and others as being biologically and morally inferior, akin to rats and worthy of mass extinction.
So after a series of magnificent successes, the 3rd Reich, (that was supposed to have lasted 1,000 years), was destroyed, (at massive humans and material loss), by invading allied armies in 1945. Germany was brought to her knees, people were wandering lost in the smashed cities. The army was utterly defeated!
With that the dogma which guided of the vanquished West Germans, (I cannot address the E. German part for lack of knowledge) was easily emptied and that was replaced with new dogma of respect and protection of other cultures. The change was rapid and highly successful.
Such a change, however, did not occur in the other European states as they had not been similarly vanquished for holding those xenophobic and expansionist, superiority views.
I cannot find such an extreme example of a mass switch of values in our lifetime. What occurred in the brains of Germans is to me a most remarkable switching of mental programming which demonstrates that such switches can be utterly complete and astonishingly effective in those changed.
No doubt there are hangers on to the largely extant dogmas, but it's fair to state the the changes likely altered most of the population.
So, is there a way, short of using force, to reprogram our brains to use only rational approaches to our environment? What other ways are there to change for the good?
Asher
