"Happy Dog" <[email hidden]> wrote in
news:[email hidden]:
Quoted message said:"Carole" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
Quoted message said:Personally, I don't like mirth and merriment - to me it is simple
minded.
This, along with a complete lack of humility and an inability to admit
error, is a fundamental characteristic of kooks. Follow this twit for
awhile, and a few others here, and note how deeply seriously they take
their beliefs All their beliefs. Early recognition of these signs is
a valuable tool in any critical thinker's kit.
I've come to believe that the kook's lack of a sense of humor is actually a
*cause* rather than an *effect* of their kookery. While I don't
necessarily agree with the sociobiologists (now calling themselves
"evolutionary psychologists"😉 that all mental traits must have been
specifically selected for, I do believe that the sense of humor serves some
adaptive purposes and I very strongly suspect that one of them is to serve
as a sanity check on our own ideations.
The essence of the sense of humor is the ability to recognize that
something is incongruous or ridiculous. If you put people, "normal," non-
delusional people, in an environment where nothing they say can be
questioned, they will rather quickly begin to come up with some really off-
the-wall stuff. And if someone lacks a sense of humor, it will happen much
more quickly. Because they can't tell if what they're coming up with is
ridiculous or not. I suspect that we all start to think absurd thoughts
several times a day, but our sense of humor shuts them down before they can
do any harm (and before we're even aware of them).
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:I prefer logic and problem solving. One of my pet hates is people who
say "Don't worry, everything will be alright" and just laugh and and
make light of situations that they should worry about.
Like the inevitability of death and decay? Humour is a tried and true
mechanism for dealing with the stress of unavoidable situations.
And since Carole doesn't have that mechanism available to her, she has to
believe that, for example, the laws of thermodynamics oppress third-world
people. The only way for her to keep from despairing is to believe that
the world can be made to work however you wish it to be. Black humor is
one of the few ways we can somewhat bridge the philosophical chasm between
"what is" and "what should be."
