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Jeffrey Koon
Author
Cultural Insanity, the Key to Understanding Our World and Ourselves:

Adult; Political & Social Sciences; (Market)

The concept of cultural insanity provides a better way of understanding much of what is wrong in our society and in the world today--and how it got that way. Where our own culture is involved, we are partly blind to it. Accordingly, correctly grasping the idea of cultural insanity will also reveal pathways to develop more realistic worldviews, improve our self-understanding, and help liberate our minds from the unseen mesh of cultural implants and biases. Surprisingly, cultural insanity can be characterized by features of a society/culture that unnecessarily thwart the development of human potential. Development potentials are outlined. Because "unnecessarily thwart" means that there must be viable alternatives, allowances are made for a culture's level of technology, its people's levels of consciousness, and more. Part One includes the theory and methods for cultural insanity analyses, along with many examples of current and recent cultural insanities from U.S. politics, history and the environmental realm. Parts Two through Four are historical case studies that consider witch-hunts, religion vs. science in the Middle Ages, and the discoveries of geologic time and evolution. With the distance in time to keep bias at bay, the reader can better see a cultural retrogression toward greater cultural insanity; a culture that resisted possibilities to advance human potential; and a once-buried cultural insanity that became fully exposed--but is still present today. The causes of cultural insanity are to some extent rooted in the evolutionary history of our species, including the way our brains operate—and thus affect all cultures. Awareness of the nature of these processes, along with more fully conscious thinking, and the use of evidence, reason and scientific methods, can help us to reduce the negative effects these influences have on our societies and culture(s), to envision better alternatives to improve the development of human potential, and to reduce humanity’s planetary devastation.
Reviews
Readers' Favorite

Reviewed by Jamie Michelle for Readers’ Favorite—5 stars

Cultural Insanity, the Key to Understanding Our World and Ourselves by Jeffrey Wynter Koon is a non-fiction work of primarily expository writing in a persuasive format. Koon's theory on why civilizations derail into frenzied, insane reasoning when absolutely no reason for these beliefs exist is broken down into four parts. The first part is a detailed, foundational explanation and a look at contemporary examples of cultural insanity following an intensive examination of the whys and hows. Part two leans into witchcraft and centuries of insanity through vessels of faith as a means of power, control, subjugation, and continuity of all. Part three pinpoints the churning out of flagrant misinformation as a means of advancing the bedrock of the authority of the Church over science. Part four transitions through the historical development of evolution and time as it applies to terrestrial evidence, contradicting long-standing proclamations and belief systems that limit the earth to an age of just a few thousand years.

Jeffrey Wynter Koon takes his time peeling back layers of theoretical structure, employing in-depth case studies and other applications of empirical support where they exist. The part that I found to be most interesting in Cultural Insanity, the Key to Understanding Our World and Ourselves was in part four, chapter 35's The Challenges Diversify and Extinctions Confirmed. I loved reading about early attempts to explain away an emergence of fossils that directly contradict archaic beliefs of the age of the earth and its inhabitants over millions of years to a devout populace who deemed extinction events impossible, but Noah's flood to be fact. This is a heavy read with a lot to offer and the research to back it up. I have no doubt it will be embraced by those who appreciate a thorough analytical construct of cultural insanity.

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