Where Your Ideas & Beliefs Come From

June 29, 2012

Interview with Richard Brodie, author of the book Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme

________________

Mike Carruthers:
We all like to believe we think for ourselves. But do we?

Richard Brodie:
A lot of the things we think of as being our own original ideas aren't really that way at all. We catch them from somewhere; we catch them from our upbringing, from TV.
 

Richard Brodie, author of the book Virus of the Mind, says we tend to accept these ideas as fact.

Nowadays it's very common to hear, "We really need national health care". Well' I don't know if we do or we don't but the way the human mind works,  if I keep hearing it from several people I trust it seems true. If I'm aligned with a political party it's really more of a feeling. I know when I hear things that are said by people I've associated with from the opposite end of the political spectrum I just naturally have a revulsion to it.

Another example, says Richard, is the conditioning we get that you will get married or that you will go to college.

And of course I don't have a college degree and neither did my friend Bill Gates who hired me at Microsoft when I wrote the first version of Microsoft Word. So, no you don't need a diploma to be successful but people just go through life thinking that's what's expected of me.

When you realize you're running on programming - in many ways you can start to rethink things.

Every interaction is an opportunity to say, "Am I doing this out of my zombie programming, out of some virus of the mind that I caught or is this really what's most important to me that I'm committed to creating?"