i think there's an argument here for not indoctrinating any child into any view until they've reached a certain level of maturity and capacity to assess ideas. Until a kid, relatively in a non brain washed kid, reaches the age of eight, nyou can't treat their religious choices, their political affiliations, or anything else, as freely chosen. In a waysaint saint francis zavier, the jesuit a, seventeenth century, eighteenth century jesuit a,. said, give me a child for the first six years, and you can do what you like with him after his point was that those are the formative years.
Astonishingly irrational ideas are spreading. COVID-19 denial, anti-vaxxers compromising public health, conspiracy thinking hijacking minds and inciting mob violence, toxic partisanship cleaving our nations, the return of Flat Earth theory… What the heck is going on? Why is all this happening, and why now? More important, what can we do about it? Does our “right to our opinion” trump our responsibilities? Does the resulting ethos effectively compromise mental immune systems, allowing “mind parasites” to overrun them? Are conspiracy theories, evidence-defying ideologies, and garden-variety bad ideas all species of mind parasites, each of which employs clever strategies to circumvent mental immune systems? In this conversation, based on the book Mental Immunity, Andy Norman shows that minds and cultures have immune systems, and that they really can break down. Fortunately, he assures us that they can also be built up: strengthened against ideological corruption. Can his ideas revolutionize our capacity for critical thinking?