Over the years and in a variety of blogs I have tried to answer the question of why so many people I know are still juvenile Marxist thinkers. Even late in life.
I finally answered the question for myself by remembering a hippy meme about the 100th monkey. The meme was spread by a friend of mine, Lyall Watson. The story said that monkeys in Japan near Kyoto figured out that rinsing raw potatoes make them more tasty without the dirt on them. That after 100 monkeys learned this, all the monkeys in Japan knew it.
It was total bullshit based on bad research. I turns out that only the young monkeys learned to rinse the potatoes. This did spread to other monkey troops as they came in contact with each other.
But mature monkeys never learned to rinse potatoes.
Therein lies the point that I used to reach my conclusion about human thinking. New learning and new thinking doesn’t occur after we reach adulthood.
I have placed homo sapiens adulthood at roughly age 23. After that our brains are hard boiled. We can solve problems but we can’t form a new view of the world or synthesize new ideas.
Of course there are exceptions. There are people who can have new thoughts after age 23. I have estimated that this occurs in one person out of every 250 people. Not many people. But a key few.
So along comes some brain research on animals that confirms my observation. Here it is.
Now we know why so many people around us still think like Lefty Peacenik teenagers.