What makes bad ideas so attractive?
It can be productive to t reat ideas as products. Carl Jung's observation that "people don't have ideas, ideas have people" means we need to be willing to apply critical thinking to ideas-as-products which may be toxic when adopted and broadcast uncritically by media or by what we assume are high-status groups or individuals. Firstly, it's all about us as consumers and our need for simple ideas. John Holt's (1965) "How Children Fail" introduced the concept of 2 types of learners (based on his observation of how children learn math) as being "thinkers or producers" (thinkers who keep asking why, and producers who just want to capture the how or the trick to working on a particular problem and move on to the next task). I would qualify this dangerous dichotomy to say that this learning strategy is contextual (in other words, we are all thinkers or producers in different contexts). Secondly, bad ideas work with people locked into ...
