EARLY INDOCTRINATION, THE DAMAGING DEAL

EARLY INDOCTRINATION, THE DAMAGING DEAL

Early indoctrination is difficult, for most even impossible, to get away from. Rationality is stifled and faith drilled in, leaving the brain incapable of critical thinking that questions and challenges traditional truths. Science is the way out but it comes much later in a child's life. By then his brain has been so badly impaired by theological or ideological indoctrination that he remains permanent victim to it. Freedom of thought along lateral lines having been lost, his rationality keeps lifelong revolving round set patterns of ideas already drilled into his brain. Consequently, stagnation comes in and intellectual evolution is impaired. 

As the individual is the elemental unit of the compound called society, social progress is thus retarded. Nations that allow free thinking march ahead while theocracies limp along behind. This sets up global power imbalances, exploitation of the weak theocracies by scientifically advanced superpowers, identity crisis among the oppressed peoples which reinforces their faith-bound dogmatism and furthers their regression to medieval times when such fanatical adherence to faith had some context. Now no more. But what of that? It takes time to evolve, education to get past indoctrination and the birth of great men and women to deliver a race from the inertial stranglehold of fanatical faith. Till then blood, sweat and toil, untold misery, patriarchy, misogyny, enslavement and all other forms of medieval monstrosity continue to hold down the soul of man who has sold his free thinking or been forced to do so by a society suffering, yet refusing 'to  shake off the sterile curse' of submission to one man's wish going forth as divine commandment. 

Written by Sugata Bose