i've had students who say it's just really important that we treat life as sacred, and if we draw the line here when it comes to fedal life, you know, it's just a slippery slope before we begin devaluing one another. I think world views on both sides, value systems on both sides, start to get more ne ants and actually nn the common ground which can initially be minors a small begins to grow a so for example. So i'm prepared to concede that the mother's interests are not the only ones that matter. And even fedal life deserves, the interests of fedal life need to be taken into account also.
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?