Wary that your thoughts aren’t your own? You may want to deprogram your own mind. A. Orange writes:
1. Recognize that programming is everywhere, and it isn’t all bad. Your programming started with your parents teaching you things, and both consciously and unconsciously programming you with all of their beliefs and attitudes. That is not necessarily bad — it is usually good. You are better off for having had parents who cared about you and wanted to teach you. But unfortunately, you also inherited all of their misinformation, superstitions, mistakes, and irrational and untrue beliefs.
And you also inherited your “culture”, which includes all of the false, irrational, and wrong beliefs of your entire society. And you are left with the job of figuring out which of those beliefs are good and true, and which are stupid and crazy.
And you are always vulnerable to pressure from your peer group, which will always try to make you conform to their beliefs, standards, and behavior, even if your friends are not even really aware of the fact that they are doing it.
