A woman known to one of the GetWisdom founders believes fanatically that she is a GOOD person, that she values the good, exudes the good, champions the good, and that her goodness detector is functioning normally at all times. Any suggestion to the contrary is defended to her last breath. Therefore, the politics she embraces is also good, and any opposition is universally bad. She is not dumb, but she engages in a kind of black-and-white, all-or-nothing style of thinking that is nearly impossible to challenge. What can Creator tell us?

This is a perfect example of the long-term consequences of living in a world of propaganda where comfort, security, and feelings of acceptance are automatically associated with a categorical idea of good or bad, and then everything that happens is either embraced or rejected summarily. What is happening is a kind of perverse efficiency, a way of coping with the world that keeps things seeming to be on an even keel and manageable because, in managing the day-to-day events, it is reduced to a simple sorting of what happens into things to be retained and things to be rejected and expelled. This serves a person by making the world appear calmer, to make sense, to be understandable, and easily navigated despite the twists and turns and unexpected events that come along. In actuality, there are many, many things that are not good or bad but somewhere in between, and it might well be preferable, tactically, to embrace something with negative attributes, because it can be worked with and exploited to advantage despite the hazards and shortcomings it has, as long as one is careful and finds a way to extract the benefits and avoid the liabilities it represents inherently. Those with open minds have more effective lives because they have a wider array of options. Living life to the fullest will require such a broad and open approach to any and all ideas and events, at least provisionally. A life that is filled with rules and constraints will ultimately be quite limited and a restriction that will restrain growth, learning, and evolution of the soul.