Cultural conditioning causes opinions to appear as facts

We live in very advanced times. We live in the most archaic times. Sometimes I wonder if we’ve not lost touch with reality and disconnectd ourselves with the ability to be reasonable.

With all the technology in the world, we still are very capable of misappropriating and abusing people in ways that serve our own ends. We’re products of our environment. We’ve been dangerously conditioned to allow experts to determine our fate — even if they have hidden agendas not in anyone’s best interests, but their own.

Does this sound skeptical and out of step with the world you live in? Well, I guess it depends on which world you live in.

If you live in the world of privileges, this thought process might seem jaded. But if you come from the underprivileged world, this thought process isn’t presumptuous and actually makes perfect sense.

If we’re not careful, our thought processes become overly conditioned by our culture and we develop deeply entrenched biases to make up our minds in spite of the facts.

Allowing so-called elite bandwagon experts to set the tempo has proven to be a problem as old as time. Often with the same misguided detrimental outcomes just repeating themselves over and over by well-meaning — and sometimes not-so-well-meaning — people, who want nothing more than to be able to make up your mind for you ultimately reshaping the way you think about everything. Cultural conditioning is real and cultural conditioning is dangerous when it leads us to come to unreasonable conclusions that are confused for facts.

Still not convinced our soci­eties shape and influence the way we think about everything and makes up our minds for us regardless of the facts? Let’s look at one example that paints a clear picture of how this works and whose effected most.

Let’s consider 25-year-old Thomas Doswell, a black man convicted of a 1986 rape of a white woman in Pittsburgh. During his 19-year imprisonment, he was denied parole four times because he emphatically insisted he was innocent.

The victim and another witness identified Thomas from photos clearly marked with an R; a practice the Pittsburgh police department routinely engaged in for anyone charged for rape. Request for testing DNA material from the rape victim continually were denied. Finally, in 2005, a judge gave orders to have the rape-kit evidence tested for DNA.

The testing proved what Thomas had been claiming all along. He was innocent and he finally was released from prison after serving almost 20 years for a crime he didn’t commit.

The practice of placing an R on the photos of individuals accused of rape is preposterous. It obviously could influence and condition the victim and the witness to choose Thomas’ photo. Talk about cultural conditioning and overtly obvious biases created in everyone’s minds. Their minds were made up, so why confuse them with the facts?

Thomas was the mature adult throughout the dastardly ordeal.

“Having the faith I have in Jesus has taught me that I couldn’t walk around for twenty years with anger bottled up in me,” he said.

He refused to allow bias conditioning to change his mind about the truth. Thomas knew the facts and the bottom line was he didn’t commit the crime.

Things are not always what they seem to be and culture shouldn’t be allowed to consume us by its self serving trends and biases.

Thankfully, the truth ultimately prevailed. Thomas Doswell’s truth didn’t change because he spent 19 years in prison. The truth was he was innocent no matter how long he spent in prison and no matter how erroneous the biases that falsely put him there.

No wonder it’s written, “do not think like children. In evil things be like infants, but in your thinking you should be like adults.”

So in how you think about living in your culture you should conduct yourself as a mature grown up. This means objectively approaching the ever-changing cultural waves and tides with eyes wide open constantly using the truth to identify dangerous life threatening under tows. If not, your culture will swallow you alive making up your mind for you and you won’t have to worry about being confused with the facts. In your thinking, if you don’t act like adults with the truth, there’s a prison cell with your name on it just waiting for you.

How much is your mind made up by cultural conditioning? It’s became pervasive at all levels. Are you willing to actually look at and consider the facts no matter where they take you?