In our earthly existence, we deal with what we know as best we can with the tools that we are offered to us or that we acquire by whatever means are open to us. We can deal with our world because of our senses and the tools these senses enable us to use. Our challenge comes when we are asked to go beyond our senses and beyond anything that we know how to manipulate with our senses. The temptation is to forgo our individual task of using our own senses and assume that we can gain by assumptions about sensations rather than the actual sensations themselves.
Secure Environments for Learning
This strategy may serve us well when it comes to very dangerous things or aspects of our world that have negative consequences when we try to put ourselves into the role of testing. If some one tells you that you cannot fly, you tend to assume that the statement is correct because if you tried to fly and failed you might end your life. Nevertheless, you might want to test the statement with a safe test where you run no risk.
Much of the extensions of our senses in new worlds is through very safe tests that we design ourselves. Many of our safe tests involve copy cat behaviour. Imitating others is a fairly safe way to extend one's sphere of experience. The problem with copy cat learning is that although it may be fairly safe, it may not represent the best that we can achieve. That depends on who or what we imitate; who or what we put our trust into.
The Leadership That We Acknowledge for Our Non-experience
For the most part our framework of trust comes through our parents and local community. As we mature, we include many more influences in our subjective lists of who and what we trust. Out of the long list of those we respect for their contribution to our understanding, we finally acquire the idea that there are specialists who lead the way in different skills and areas of knowledge. These experts and specialists wax and wane in their influence over people. A number of things stand out.
In our complex world, we do not normally have freedom to choose who we imitate, follow or accept as leaders. Most often these choices are made by others for us and we tend to be pushed, influenced, badgered, or forced into acceptance of the ideas of others whom we have not tested for ourselves.
We tend not to have any freedom of choice yet go about our daily lives as though we did. The majority of people are deluded and live in a fantasy world in which they have no control over anything meaningful in their lives.
Gaining Freedom by Joining a Small Group
This is the great realization of teenagers who for the first time have the courage to face up to the tremendous forces that shape their thoughts and experiences. Lacking any power over their individual actions, they collect together into small groups where their influence and testing can take place independent of the larger community.
Within the small group, there may be some freedom, but again that freedom may also be an illusion and the group be under the influence of an individual or individuals whose fantasies are a delusion.
The Risks of Getting it Wrong
For many the social aspects of belonging to a group outweigh the strategy of getting a valid perspective of one's world. Thus, it is that a mentally deficient child can be persuaded to carry a bomb and blow themselves up, killing many innocent people. Thus, it is that Ben Laden can laugh, or chuckle to himself about those that committed suicide in the September 911 atrocities. While the Koran's original words cannot be reexamined, it is possible for young men to die under the illusion that they will be served maidens when in reality they would receive grapes.