Lots to respond to from both yours and Neo's writing, so I'll just start with what rings the bell loudest:
JJ!
Fear?What makes the individual an outcast when they do not go along with the program?
Just so. Nature in general does not like behavior outside the norm... unless it's a behavior that adjusts to environmental circumstances and creates a 'new normal' (an expression, I fear, we are going to be hearing a lot about) that enhances survival... but even then, is the behavior liked because any who would reject it are either dead or weak from just that environmental circumstance? (Darwin! Speak to me!)Being social animals we are hard wired to be suspicious of anyone who does not run with the herd.
Now, when we translate this tendency, assuming the validity of such a translation, to the higher, social mammals, do we see a correlation? I think so. Here's the catch: the existing behavior complex always rejects the mutation even if snuffing it out is detrimental to its own continuance.
Moving further up the scale of complexity, we pass the threshold to human abstraction (
) where I am tempted to grow a beard, cover my face in ashes and run screaming into the forest.
Jesus Christ!
The perfect case study. This guy comes along at the very sweet spot of history. Hellenism had mixed the culture complexes of south-eastern Europe, North-Africa and the Near East to the Indus Valley, resulting in a stew of new ideas. Rome cemented them together with new roads and efficient commerce.
Wow. May you live in interesting times! (I think we do. Again: )
Jesus commits various acts of heresy, especially the classic mystic identification with the divine, and, as the story goes, the System demanded termination with extreme prejudice.
However, the idea, thrown up against the wall, stuck, and overwhelmed the existing structures and became the System.
But it brought some dominant genes along on one of its DNA strands which expressed itself, (Council of Nicaea? Various expressions of the Christian movement were in conflict up to that point.) as exactly like the original system that tried to snuff it out to begin with.
Out of the box thinking had one of those skull and crossbones red, warning labels for the next thousand years.
And neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment could completely remove this 'genetic' impulse.
Yet, at the terminal moraine of Christian expansion, Western Individualism established a place on the DNA sequence, as it were, perhaps opening the door a bit for the Renaissance to burst through? (Don't know about that one... just thought of it.) I'm talking about the Arthur tales, specifically the Grail Quest.
JJ:
Answer:I wonder why anyone would want to "start from scratch".
Don't we all start from scratch? The 'forest' is information available.... they each took their own turning into the forest “where he saw the forest was the thickest and there was no way or path….”
Lions and tigers and bears! Oh my!