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In Reply to: Excellent post from P.D. from way down the board posted by Reposter on October 31, 2002 at 08:45:04:
Excellent indeed.
What I would like to add is that peer pressure plays a role in the case of religious and other ideological types of thought inducement-like of environments. This is a known characteristic of group hysteria that passes through recent history, from hate to Jewish people in some parts or Europe, to hate of Japanese-looking people in America and now the apprehension against Arab-looking people.
Ideas do not move alone but through others we respect, like and even love. That is part of the common wisdom that says how birds of the feather flock together and several other sayings with the same gist. Peer pressure comes to play as we develop the emotional link to others who bring in their views. In an environment like the family, we found many whom we respected, liked and loved, who had just a little bit of ideology we didn't like in them but we didn't fight it. By accepting those bits in so many, they were permeating our own ideologies and from us overlooking them they gradually went to getting accustomed to them, to examining them, to being persuaded by them, and to finally being accepted.
That is how ideology works because the brain in human beings are make sense machines and don't accept incongruence, also known as "cognitive dissonance". Our brain strives to take the information we have of the world and make the infrastructure that makes them possible, we create out own reality based on that information. The family provided the information that doing this and that was OK and soon enough we swallowed it.
We have to understand that this doesn't minimize or exonerate the criminal and even worse, a sin against God, that Berg committed but if we don't understand how we got in there, can we find our way out? It doesn't even say that we are gullible or weak. It says that we took a wrong path at some point. It also says that regardless of the reasons why we joined and what we later did, we eventually were able to realize the mistake we made and turned around towards freeing ourselves from the evil ideologies.
