On Getting Stronger When Weakened

Which of these entities gets stronger when attacked and threatened?

• Cancer
• Bacteria

I think the answer is, strangely, bacteria. Cancer can be destroyed with chemo, and generally doesn’t get stronger as a result. Bacteria, on the other hand, will be mostly destroyed with antibiotics but will ultimately adapt and become resilient.

Which of these entities gets stronger when attacked and threatened?

• Christianity
• Science

I think both of these get stronger when threatened. Christianity has a mental framework for handling threats: God is testing you. He would not test you if He didn’t think you could survive the test. So failing the test is not a failure of God but a failure of your faith. Pretty brilliant. If the test is too horrible to qualify as a God test, then it’s a temptation from the Devil. Same results.

Science also gets stronger when tested. In fact it’s entirely based on using tests to gain knowledge. If you test and prove a long-held theory to be wrong or incomplete, you’re a scientific hero.

When religious thought gets challenged, they become even stronger religious thoughts.

When scientific thoughts get challenged, we gain stronger scientific thoughts.

A good test when applying this question is to ask: when X is attacked or weakened, does it become more X?

Things that answer yes to that question are therefore very difficult to destroy.

Religion has tried for centuries to destroy science, and vice versa, and the results have only created stronger cultures of each.

Now, which of these become stronger when attacked?

• Democracy
• Terrorism

When terrorist organizations are attacked, those attacks also further the messages they are promoting, broadcasting them worldwide, which enable easier recruitment of new members. Terrorists like ISIS are more like bacteria than cancer… every attack makes them more resilient to future attacks. Of course they also benefit from the qualities of religious thought.

Democracy, on the other hand, doesn’t get stronger when attacked. We become fearful of our previous openness, inclusivity, and transparency. We consolidate power (rather than distributing it to the people), we become fearful of strangers, and attempt to remove voting power from people that don’t agree with us. Democracy seems to become weaker when threatened or attacked.

Is it possible that democracy is more of a “healthy state” of a cultural dynamic that oscillates between democracy and empire depending on outside circumstances? More like the flowering stage of a plant lifecycle than a stable state of its own? And we’re currently watching our flower centerpiece age on the dining table?

What version of our culture gets stronger when attacked?

It makes me think that we’ll ultimately end up relying on religious or scientific thought as the foundation of our culture if we want it to survive more challenges in the future.

What would a system of government based on the scientific method look like? Would it be completely crazy?

— written on BART