"'History', Stephen said, 'is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake'."
--from Ulysses by James Joyce

This is as a supplement to my post on EasternOrthodox's fine thread "Good stories from the world of Islam".

Everything happens for a reason, according to observable habits or laws.  Finding out how light behaves as it does is relatively simple, compared to human behaviours.  That gets extremely complicated.

Most of our day-to-day lives are unconscious -- we aren't aware of the endless processes that are always going on within us and around us, which is a good thing, would you like to be aware, right now, of what every neuron in your brain was doing?

This is both good and bad and neutral.  When we first learn something, we have to concentrate, be aware of it -- remember learning how to tie your shoelaces?  Over time, with practice, it became easier and easier until now, you don't even have to think aboot it.  It is an unconscious act.  It has become a habit.

Sometimes it is bad.  Say you grew up in a war zone where you learned that a siren meant there was danger nearby.  Now, the war ends, and that danger has passed, but you still react that way to sirens.  The flight response is activated, certain chemicals get pumped into you...and if this keeps on happening, your body will wear itself out.

We operate according to habits.  Some of these habits are more 'hard wired' than others, harder to change.  Sometimes this is good, sometimes this is not good.  One's experiences create these habits -- some-but-not-all of them were created automatically (without knowledge), like the person who reacts to sirens, above.

One can learn how these habits work and be able to predict behaviours.  There are people and groups and organizations who are very good at this.  And it doesn't matter how smart you are, either.

History can be used to enforce 'culture'; history is just really "this is what we think happened", but it can be used to control people, to enforce certain behaviours and deny other behaviours.  Culture is just a set of behavioural norms that some group or a person or some such, at one time in the past, discovered and it worked for them and then others follow it and they call themselves 'the same culture'.

There are reasons for everything.

Ready?  Here are some really fun things by a self-identified atheist Zionist Jew, Howard Bloom, who seems to be really good at seeing the 'bird's eye view' of things.

On state-promoted censorship and surviving 1,300 years of nightmare.

Timeline of habit forming

Now for some fun audiovisuals.  NSFW because there is some 'swearing'.

So people operate according to predictable habits, which can be generated by our experiences, of which we have to be taught how to be aware of them and how they work etc etc & there are people/organizations/groups/states who know how to use this.

(funny irony moment for me is that when I hear people go through one of the iterations of 'the west deserves it' then that would mean that "Islam" deserves it as well due to their 1,300 year global empire.  Which, of course, as we know, is a really silly thing -- everyone goes blind for an eye for an eye, but white man's burden, what can you do?)

And there you go.  Grist for your mental & social mill.

I heartily recommend his books.  They are a very fun read, if you like the 'bird's eye' look at things.
 

The Global Brain

The Genius of the Beast

The Lucifer Principle