Inception

My wife and I for the first time since our son was born went last night to see a movie. We settled on the Leonardo DiCaprio movie Inception.

The movie was about a group of agents that get into people's dreams and steal information. The special plot of the movie was that they were going to try to get into a person's mind and rather than mind it for data, they wanted to plant a new idea in it.

At one point, the lead dream agent is talking about how ideas work. He said that once an idea takes root in a person's mind it is nearly impossible it is to unseat that idea. Once it has taken hold it is hard to counter it.

In this case, the movie was describing an idea as coming from outside and being planted in a person as opposed to something that a person thinks up himself.

Is this how our minds work? Do we sit around like empty vessels while others pour ideas into our head? I think sometimes that is the case, but often it is more complicated. An idea has to either fit into your preconceived notion of the universe, or you have to rearrange your mental contents to accommodate the new information. Maybe some people can jam discordant pieces of information in a jumble in their heads, but it seems to be a difficult proposition at best. Maybe that's why contradictions are sometimes so interesting. I pessimistically believe that most people with a head packed full of wrong information, will jealously guard the integrity of their own reality against assault and reject incoming information that conflicts with their own previously held beliefs. There are too many examples of willful ignorance for this to be a rare or casual observation. New ideas, even when truthful, correct, and useful, are often challenged and resisted.

I can understand why this is. If the mind is like a building, put together brick by brick, there are times when accepting a new concept is like asking someone to tear down a wall of their house and rebuild it from scratch from the bottom up.

An obvious example is religion versus science. If a person believes that Earth is 6,000 years old and was whisked into existence all at once by a supreme being, what are they to make of dinosaur fossils, geological records, astronomical observations, and a raft of other sciences that point to a much older world? The reactions fall into many categories. Some completely and vehemently reject all new information that conflicts with their previously held beliefs. Others simply ignore the new information, adopting a posture of deliberate ignorance or disinterest in the conflicting concepts - sometimes not even grasping the point of the new input sufficiently to see that there is a conflict. Others recognize and understand that there is a disagreement, but maintain a serene acceptance of their own beliefs and a faith that this additional information will be reorganized and resubmitted later more in accordance to what they already know to be true. Some people embrace contradictions. They might accept that two opposing things can both be simultaneously true, and enjoy the challenge of maintaining the logic of the two separate ideas without letting them actually fight it out to the death in their mental arena. A small amount of people will see conflicts and take the time to sort them out, with equal weight to the ideas that got to their head first and the new ones that came later. Knowing that you could be wrong in what you believe and being willing to tear into your memories, dredge them up and discard the rotten or unsound fragments embedded in your head is not always an easy task, especially if done properly. There are some individuals out there that are gullible, seem to have no convictions and simply believe the last thing that was told to them, but those people are rare.

There are many examples of organizations that are excellent at implanting ideas. While the obvious first example is a school, you have to realize that their task is not so difficult. They are taking blank canvases and painting fresh scenes on them. I was thinking first of talk radio. In many ways it is extremely successful at implanting ideas in people's minds, regardless of whether those ideas make any sense or not. While propaganda is simply biased misinformation, the adept use of propaganda to sway groups of people is a skill sometimes employed as a high art form. "A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth." People attribute this quote to Lenin, and it has been used as an example of the how Communism subverts truth for its own ends. This is just a form of trying to insert ideas into masses of people and can truly be called brainwashing. It's another logical fallacy called proof by assertion, where you repeat something often enough until all challenges to it dry up and it is accepted as fact. It's an interesting Wikipedia entry, talking about how modern political parties use this in the form of talking points to hijack the national debate.

In any case, once an idea has taken root in a person's mind, it is difficult to displace, and really can only successfully be countered with the help of the person from within.