The time has come for the second part of my signature to apply.
Before I go though, I'd like to add one more observation. I'm sure everyone's already noticed: Clirus represents people in stereotypes. In her mind, Christians are unequivocally good, Atheists are evil and will experience disease, death and poverty because of their 'Atheistic Lifestyle', gays will acquire HIV/AIDS because of their homosexuality, most poor people are at fault for their own poverty, illegitimate children and their mothers will become welfare dependents, people who fail to provide for their children are always at fault for that failure. Etc, are among some of the stereotypes that Clirus has formulated. She paints all social identities that she dislikes with an all too broad brush.
In Clirus mind, these stereotypes are stable concepts of social categorization: they are representations of the way things are. We know, however, and throughout the course of many threads we have shown, that these representations are not stable: they have little applicability to the way things
actually are, and are more-or-less simply manifestations of Clirus' own prejudices.
When these stereotypical images are inspected and indeed challenged, Clirus does not relinquish them at all, she merely repeats them as though incessant repetition were a valid substitute for sound argument (it's not). It is impossible for her to conceive of a world in which the variables that she has claimed to be significantly correlated, indeed causally linked, are not. A world where there might not necessarily be a
significant association between Atheism and poverty (see
#139). A world where homosexuality and HIV/AIDS are not causally connected in some metaphysical sense. A world where failure to provide for one's child is not always caused by parental negligence, laziness or some abject failure of personal responsibility.
The problem with Clirus' whole ideology is that she cannot move beyond the stereotypes that she has created. She has developed a simple, but broad, schema for categorizing social experiences and attaching meaning to them, even when the meaning attached does not necessarily apply in all (or most) cases. This ill-founded, rigid and dogmatic conceptual framework lies at the core of her ideology, and for whatever reason, Clirus seems unable to move beyond that. She is either unable or otherwise unwilling to modify these cognitive schema to accomodate for new information and insights. Instead, she finds some elaborate way of assimilating the information according to her
existing schema. This makes persuading Clirus a futile endeavor, for she will always convince herself that her conceptual system, her mode of representation, is correct. This does not make our efforts in vain however. While persuading Clirus is impossible, showing her that her ideas are unfounded, challenged and indeed rejected is possible.
I hope that Clirus can, over the course of time, learn to modify the rigid schema that she currently employs to represent the world internally.
On that note... I'm off! Happy posting.
Cheers.
