born to be conditioned

When i was in primary school, I read about this tribe in africa where people finds women with long necks...beautiful.

It's not just women born with a slight 1-2 centimetres longer necks than average, but long necks of a result of forcing them with metal rings worn to deliberately "pull" them longer by at least 10-20 centimetres.

And then i remember reading about this kid who went missing and somehow got raised by a pack of wolves. i dunno why the wolves did not eat the baby but raised it like one of them. when they found the lost kid, he can only walk on fours, hunts like a wolf and behaves like a wolf.

Well, i was really young then. still in primary school. So i thought, how can anyone human being regard a long necked women as a beauty? how can a kid born to walk, lost it altogether?

And then, I learnt about the term "cognitive learning". dunno if i remembered the term right but basically what it means is if you flash to a guy many many times, video clips of a thirsty man enjoying the quenching of his thirst with Brand X cola, the man will eventually buy a brand X cola whenever he gets thirsty.

and if Brand Y do it even more times, he will buy brand Y.

and if Brand Z do the video clip in such a way that clicks with that guy's personality, he will buy brand Z. so on and so forth.

Of course this is advertising term, a street term would be "brain washed", or another term that covers more would be conditioned.

Social conditioning (some call it social engineering), behaviour conditioning etc etc.

In the movie "Cast Away", Tom Hanks finally mastered the skill of spearing a moving fish from at least 3 metres away. No big deal, humans were once hunters. This is one of the skills we can acquired if we "train" since young.

But you ask a modern man to do it, he would go to the market and buy a fish.

Because since young, whenever he needs to eat a fish, he goes to the market, like what was thought by his parents, conditioned by his growing up process and the society.

He is conditioned to judge that a modern man spearing a fish...is just...not right.

So that means how we all behave today, what we believes in, what makes us laugh, what makes us cry, what kind of gal or guy makes our heart beat faster is all a result of conditioning.

All societies are conditioned in certain ways. Japanese likes to bow, chinese likes to be loud during business dinner, shanghainese likes their food to be sweet, americans likes burgers, french likes wine.

These are all fine. These makes meeting people from different places a very interesting experience.

However, what if one day we are conditioned to think that any war can be justified?

what if one day we are conditioned to think that anything said by those in power is the gospel truth?

What if one day, someone found out that there is something that humans are born to do by instinct, and are conditioned to do otherwise by those in power for unknown reasons?

that is so easy to be done by anyone who has power over the mass media nowadays. As long as what you see since you were born were controlled by those in power, you are but a pawn in their hands.

Helger, once said (not exact words), if you show a guy only the shadows since the day he was born, he will never know how a candle light throws a shadow on the wall.

We should condition ourselves to question and think hard on anything in life. If not, what makes us one up from the other animals?

If not, what makes us different from dead, cold power consuming computers waiting to be programmed?