[Neurons] 2023 Neurons #7 THE UNSANITY OF IDEOLOGICAL THINKING

Sun Feb 5 08:04:51 EST 2023

From: L. Michael Hall

2023 Neurons #7

February 6, 2023

THE UNSANITY OF

IDEOLOGICAL THINKING

There was a tragedy.  You probably heard about it on the news.  Actually it
occurred January 7, 2023 and it resulted in the tragic death of Tyre
Nichols, a 29 year old black man.  The officers claimed to have stopped
Nichols for reckless driving in Memphis Tennessee.  Then several things went
wrong and it resulted in a tragedy for everyone.

The first thing that went wrong was that Nichols began resisting the
officers and fighting with them.  Bad decision!  So after pulling him from
his car, they used pepper spray and a taser on him.  Then as Nichols
continued to resist, he managed to break away from them.  That's when the
next thing that went wrong occurred on the officers part.  That's because
when they caught him, they were not in the right state and they beat him for
three minutes, punching and kicking him in the head and striking him on the
back with a baton and they did that while he was restrained.  More really
bad decisions!  Afterwards Nichols was hospitalized in critical condition
and he then died three days later.

Now all five of the Police officers were also black.  Two were new to the
force having been hired after the Police lowered standards for hiring in
order to get more people on the force (another bad decision!).  As of
January 20, all five officers have been fired from the force.  Not only
that, but in addition, three firefighters, two emergency medical technicians
and a lieutenant who attended the scene were relieved of duty and
subsequently fired for failing to conduct an adequate patient assessment of
Nichols.  Two other police officers were also later relieved of duty.

That was the event-that's what happened.  But what does it mean?  What
explains it?  The simplest and most obvious explanation is that it was an
interplay of two sets of forces-on the part of Tyre Nichols, his resistance
and refusal to cooperate.  He should have known better.  Anyone pulled over
should know better.  Cooperation always makes things go better.  Talking it
out to determine the truth of a situation is always the best choice.

On the part of the officers, they seemed completely incompetent about
knowing how to subdue a person and how to do so showing respect to the
person while trying to control a situation.  Several videos have been
publicized on television and on the internet since this event showing simple
trainable techniques for subduing a person without causing bodily harm.  But
these officers apparently did not have that training and fell back on more
savage behavior.

As noted in the previous posts, experience and meaning are two very
different things.  What happens consists of the sensory-based facts.
Meaning comes after that and goes to a person's interpretations.  And with
determining the validity of an interpretation, we have to look to the
person's ability to be as objective as possible and the cognitive biases
that predispose a person to read into events things that are not there.
William of Ockham insightfully said: 

              "With all things being equal, the simplest explanation tends
to be the right one." 

The simplest explanation here-unintelligent resistance plus professional
incompetence equals tragedy death and firing.  What a disastrous
combination!  By way of contrast, a dozen or more so-called journalists on
the mainstream media used their biases and ideology to interpret this event.
Unbelievably they were able to distort things to such an extent that they
concluded that the five black police officers were "white supremists" of all
things(!) and/or "contaminated by white racism."  And as ridiculous as that
is, they expressed that ideology with a straight face.  That's how blinding
any ideology can be, how unsane.  For them, interpretation comes before
facts.  And, let the facts be damned if they don't support our ideology.

[Who has said such non-sense?  The former ESPN talking head Jemele Hill was
one who rushed to blame White supremacy.  CNN's Van Jones echoed the
sentiment, as did Democrat Reps. Maxwell Frost of Florida, and Mondaire
Jones of New York, and Black Lives Matter activist Bree Newsome.]

There was no racism in that event-there was incompetence.  There was stupid
resistance.  There was hiring of officers who had lower standards.  Simple
as that.  To read more into it than that demands that a person rely on his
ideology, prejudices, and biases-the opposite of critical thinking.  The
solution is to teach people how to truly think, and to think clearly and
objectively.  And that's what the Meta-Model of Language is designed to
facilitate.

A good friend, Anil Thomas in India has made a very short but impressive 2
minutes video regarding what is NLP.  I think you will like it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idu3PuFJcG8
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idu3PuFJcG8&t=13s> &t=13s

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

ISNS Executive Director

P.O. Box 8

Clifton Colorado 81520 USA

(970) 523-7877

drhall at acsol.net  

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