Jack & Tom when I attended university at UW Madison I got into countless debates with “greens” and always brought up the question of why they didn’t try harder to enlist the help of the ‘hawks” (also posed the opposite question to the hawks) seeing as their goals could be complementary if we reduced out dependence on imported energy. No one could ever give a rational answer.
My experience there supports Adrian’s assertion of the cult like nature of many of these people. For anyone interested in this version of groupthink I highly recommend reading Thomas Sowell’s book:
The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy Thomas Sowell is an easy interesting read. I even went to see him speak at U.W. Madison. However, a group of freedom loving open minded lefties attended just so they could shout him down when he tried to speak. The university didn’t stop them because they were exercising their right to free speech. I guess Mr. Sowell and the group sponsoring him weren’t.
Don’t read me incorrectly. I despise the far right as much as the far left as IMO they are exactly the same in their thinking due to similar social psychological motivations. I read a paper done by some researchers at a Mid Western university (can’t remember were) in the 1980s in which they ostensibly re-conducted a psychological survey from the 1930 to gauge how responses changed from one era to another . In reality they were looking at how political affiliation effected the scoring of the respondents. They found that as with most things people fell along a standard curve with the left and right political extremes scoring equally high. What they didn’t tell the respondents was the that the test they took was a screening examination for officer candidates in the
Schutzstaffel Please note that I am not suggesting that everyone who believes/supports a particular cause fits into the above categories. Just that a significant enough number of people do to scare the hell out of me.
