The power given to words

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, as far as I can tell, is an interesting read and provides some valuable insights into the Puritan settlers who first colonized America. It also happens to remind me of a few things that I've heard before.

The scarlet letter referenced in the book title no doubt has a negative connotation, but it and pretty much every other word in existence only really has as much power and meaning as we decide to give it. I mean, think about the idea of a scarlet letter if it was not referenced with a book. It would be a red colored...letter. It would be like hearing a word from another language. Without some knowledge or context to work out what the word in question means, the only real thought possible in such a situation is simply, "What does that signify"?

The thing is, the scarlet letter only has meaning when we have an idea or know what it means. Reading the first chapter of the book is enough to give you enough context that the letter is probably bad. Looking at the covers of the books we were given and seeing the rather sullen face of the woman with the letter is also context. We learn that the book is going nowhere good and the woman is probably not doing so well (Also if you DO know what the letter means note that the woman is holding a baby).

We made language by assigning values or definitions to arbitrarily picked sounds (this is probably why we have different languages -- everyone just assigned the values to different sounds). This is also why some languages happen to have words for certain things while others suffer from such lexical gaps (see below).

This is also a scarlet letter, and though it is also not good news, it most certainly is NOT the same as Hawthorne's scarlet letter

Lexical Gaps (as explained by Hank Green)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LpHfPOM6GQ

Give me liberty or give me death...or both!

Allow me to start off by pointing out that Patrick Henry is dead. He has been dead for a long time. But before he died he became one of the most influential founding fathers of the greatest nation in history, a nation founded on the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But also remember that the US was created in a revolution. And a revolution, as pointed out by the video below, means a 360 degree turn. So it's worth asking the following question: did we actually change at all?

Even Patrick Henry himself, despite his calls for liberty, strongly opposed the US Constitution on the grounds that it created a president that could easily turn into a new king. Yet despite his protests, the Constitution was ratified and the office of President created. So if our initial idea of governing head was based on the British model, did we really change? Or did we simply change leaders?

Remember that on the Declaration of Independence, the founding fathers listed grievances towards Britain in terms of things that the King did. They protested HIS rule and subsequently fired up rebellion. But considering the fact that the initial issue with Britain that started the whole thing was "taxation without representation,"they were OK with the taxation and representation in Parliament meant something.

Eventually we ended up with the US and its Congress (based on Parliament) and its President (Loosely based on the king). They just were filled with different guys.

"Look at all those stairs we climbed! We must have made such progress!"

A revolution is a 360 degree turn plus some background info on the American Revolution.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EiSymRrKI4

Hysteria

People who live today can easily claim to be extremely different compared to, for example, the Europeans that colonized America. But is that really true? Changes between generations of living beings tend to be minute at best -- for example, there was no point at which a wolf became a dog, or, as minutephysics will point out in the video at the end, no point at which a proto-chicken became a chicken. There was no generation during which a colonial-era human gave birth to a modern-day human. So how do we know that we have changed? Well, maybe we haven't. In fact, in terms of actual behavioral change, we probably haven't changed much from our distant cave men ancestors. For example, we tend to feel adrenaline rushes while presenting to an audience. As a result, we are jumpy and speak quickly. So if the adrenaline doesn't help us, why do we have it? Probably because such mechanisms were useful in prehistoric eras when humans had to respond to unforeseen dangers quickly. But why am I discussing long term changes anyway?

Because we have made almost none. We still react the same way to the same stimuli as before; we just have more sophisticated titles for things that scare us. Witches and Communists are both equally unlikely to take over America, but we have responded with the same fear and finger waggling to both. It simply takes a target that many people hate combined with some over-zealous investigators as well as some high intensity accusation matches to cause the mass hysteria that engulfs and damages society.

Even now, we are still freaking out over entirely useless things. Things like the Illuminati. Or the shadow bankers of the Knights Templar. Or Majestic Twelve.

Or this guy.

Minutephysics discusses change/evolution

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a8pI65emDE

Democracy may not always be the best idea

No doubt we all remember the Salem Witch Trials as a horrific event filled with wild accusations, brutal trials and executions, and mass hysteria and mob mentality. But the Salem Witch Trials were certainly not the norm or else we would not remember them as well. So what made the Salem Witch Trials possible?

To start, the government in Salem at the time takes some of the blame. The theocracy in charge of Salem and indeed the region made witchcraft a crime that is both heavily punished and yet easy to pin on others. This makes it possible for vengeance to be extracted fairly easily through legal means. Social standards also are a little at fault as the lack of privacy advocated in the community certainly made it easy to feed on the resulting paranoia and convert it to mass hysteria

The most important factor in the creation of the Salem Witch Trials, though, has to be the mob mentality.

As pointed out by John Proctor in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, the accusing party in the Witch Trials is never at fault and is often seen as completing a holy task. Thus, there is a huge incentive to be part of the accusing party -- accusations against you will not be taken seriously. As the mob grew larger and larger the power it wielded grew until the courts began to act like democracies; you won if more people screamed with you. And with the charges more often than not leveled on a single person, it's rather hard for the accused to win such a battle.

This effect can be shown in a segment in the following video clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygEEL57AcZs
Start at about 6 minutes in and end at 7 for the specific segment about a democracy vs a republic.

The powers of democracy and mob mentality made it so that the powerful elite at the head of the mob could charge who they liked of Witchcraft and get many of them to die or lose their reputations. Thus, the Trials could commence in of their grisly glory (or lack of glory thereof).