Social Dementia Causes Heated Misunderestimations

The Mythical Red-Blue Amygdala

In the post The Failure of Applied American Epistemology, Dredd Blog pointed out that our educational system is not as much of a problem as our national dementia is.

The essence of that post is that knowledge does us no good at all if we think knowledge is the result of a debate between Dumb and Dumber.

Or that knowledge can result from an argument between Dumbest and competent science.

Never-the-less, that is undoubtedly one of our national characteristics, because we imagine that dishonest political debate, or other forms of intellectually dishonest argument, are the ways of science, or the way to useful "knowledge."

This may be a result of our educational system having been dwarfed by the propaganda system for about a century now.

You may be thinking that I am talking about so called gray areas where valid debate is merited, but that is not the case.

I am talking about not being able to recognize long-settled science, such as global warming induced climate change.

The recent NOAA State of the Climate report is unequivocal on that science, as has been the scientific reality for decades now:

U.S. records warmest March; more than 15,000 warm temperature records broken

First quarter of 2012 also warmest on record; early March tornado outbreak is year's first "billion dollar disaster"

Record and near-record breaking temperatures dominated the eastern two-thirds of the nation and contributed to the warmest March on record for the contiguous United States, a record that dates back to 1895. More than 15,000 warm temperature records were broken during the month.

The average temperature of 51.1°F was 8.6 degrees above the 20^th century average for March and 0.5°F warmer than the previous warmest March in 1910. Of the more than 1,400 months (117+ years) that have passed since the U.S. climate record began, only one month, January 2006, has seen a larger departure from its average temperature than March 2012.

Note: The March 2012 Monthly Climate Report for the United States has several pages of supplemental information and data regarding the unprecedented early 2012 temperatures.
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(State of The Climate, NOAA). The report goes on to point out that every single state in the contiguous U.S. recorded historically high warm temperatures in March.

Nevertheless, there are people, including scientists, who fear that the world will be frozen in an upcoming, ongoing, ice age.

The saying "everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not there own facts" comes to mind.

But remember that dementia is a cognitive disease which places either an individual, or a nation, into a vortex of not being able to tell the difference between fact and fiction:

What we see, hear, smell, taste, and experience via other sensory input, goes through our amygdala before it ever reaches the area of our conscious brain (see e.g. The Toxic Bridge To Everywhere, a post with some focus on fear-based damage to the amygdala as one source of social dementia.)

The amygdala can and does sometimes actually become like a PR (public relations) firm within the brain, which "spins" everything to fit our culture's world view, in effect to deceive us, or to render us socially demented (which can be simply defined as "becoming a member of a culture, meme complex, group, or society that is out of touch with reality").

(Etiology of Social Dementia - 5). Dementia is known to be a dangerous condition for individuals, but we seem to think is has no impact on a nation.

Think again.

The following video shows over 15,000 places in the United States that recorded warmest temperatures in history during March 2012.

The next post in this series is here.

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Connect the dots:

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