ARE YOU
BRAINWASHED?

A self-diagnostic ideology and ethics quiz designed:
*	to test you,
*	to challenge you ,
*	to pinpoint your current location within the ideological universe, and
*	to help you find better navigational stars

QUESTIONS

Link to first question, test page for questions 1-6

Preview skip ahead to:
Questions 07-12
Questions 13-18
Questions 19-24
Questions 25-30

Preview skip ahead to the test results page by clicking here.

BACKGROUND DISCUSSION

by William B. Fox

One of the major characteristics of brainwashed individuals is that they are unable to think analytically. They are often ignorant of opposing ideas and the different variables that go into policy decisions. Furthermore, they often fail to comprehend how these things tend to trade-off against each other.

Much of America today has become a mindlocked society of hype and illusion. You do yourself a favor to disillusion yourself, because in the long run we always pay a price for our ignorance both in terms of real costs and opportunity costs.

The following is a 30 question survey I have developed based upon three trade-off dualities explained in greater detail in my resolving opposing ideological viewpoints series. The trade-offs involve the centralization vs. decentralization debate commonly found in management science, the environmental vs. genetics debate found in both the social and natural sciences, and an ethical debate paradigm that can also be found in both sciences.

The time required to go through 30 questions is well worth it if you are tired of being propagandized and manipulated by political, economic, and religious leaders. It is also worthwhile if you are interested in a deeper understanding regarding why you agree or disagree with political candidates on specific issues, such as the ten questions comprising the excellent online quiz at votechooser.com.

The test may be more fun for you if I leave my description of the nature of the ethical debate paradigm vague until after you take the test. I believe that most Americans will probably experience some shock when they see how I define and explain this area. But my approach is also shockingly self-evident and common sense, even though most political correctness people today never go anywhere near it. This, incidentally, is a bad sign of our times.

The ethical issues-related questions are sometimes qualitatively different than the other types of questions. Sometimes they are satirical in tone rather than academic.

No doubt it may seem strange at first to have about a third of the questions in an "ideological" survey pertain to ethics, but there is a very good reason for this. Just as economics is inseparable from politics, so both of these two areas are also inseparable from ethics. Expressed differently, I believe that in the real world better than half of what is presented to us as some kind of "ideological viewpoint" is in fact nothing more than a smokescreen to hide special interests.

"Ideology" is not only used as a tool to help people perceive ideas and organize their knowledge, but also as a weapon to lie about facts, steer opinion, and exploit people's ignorance.

An important underlying problem with ideology is that as much as we may hate being "ideologized," the underlying human process of cognition depends on it. Human learning is typically a cyclical feedback process where people typically have to preconceive something before they can "see" it, which in turn may alter the mental models they utilize to preconceive for the next round of cognition. I go into all this in more detail in Part Three of a series where I address some of the artificial intelligence problems encountered in the the mobile robotics revolution. I describe how a robot must first be able to preconceive a pencil and a table as separate entities before it can "see" a pencil lying on top of a table and tell them apart.

It is worth paraphrasing the remarks of some famous thinkers and commentators about the use of ideology as highly manipulative propaganda. Dr. John Kenneth Gailbraith once remarked that a primary function of most economists is to obfuscate rather than to clarify. Mark Twain once quipped that America's only distinctly native criminal class is its Congress. Will Rogers said that you do not have to go Vaudeville to see clowns because the biggest ones are in Washington, D.C.

Getting back to ethics, people look foolish when they wade through political and economic arguments and take too much at face value. One needs to be good at "smelling the rat."

This survey is unique to the extent that it fully elaborates upon authentic arguments and insights that are often suppressed by controlled national media. Unfortunately since so many Americans are unfamiliar with the "full scale" parameters of many important issues, I felt it necessary to provide explanatory background paragraphs. I have included arguments that were central to the political debate in the 19th century but have been flushed down the memory hole today.

If many of these arguments seem too extreme or unfamiliar to you, and you "can't handle it" or "you hate it," this is in fact what I want to test for. This is a strong real world indicator that you have in fact been politically "conditioned," "handled," and "brainwashed."

Thomas Jefferson once commented that "There is not a truth that I fear or would wish unknown to the world." If you had a real education under your belt, you should already thoroughly understand the ideas contained within all the opposing statements and take them calmly in stride. Conversely if certain arguments seem strange, offensive, or unfamiliar and arouse reaction and drive you towards opposing viewpoints, those opposing viewpoints may in fact fairly characterize your subconsciously conditioned every day political "attitude."

Often politics is defined more by what people believe they hate than what they think they like. If you are brainwashed, I do want to provoke you and hit a nerve.

Hopefully this survey will inspire individuals to go beyond mere reaction to engage in some deep thinking about important controversies, to include why America seems to be committing suicide on so many fronts. After taking the test, please see my Critical Issues discussion that provides charts and links regarding our plummeting economic vital signs and self-destructive foreign policy.

The scale from -5 to +5 is only meant to show relative standing. "-5" does not mean any consistent ideological position such as "left wing" or "decentralized." In fact, I have changed around the "-5" and "+5" designations to avoid any direct ties to any particular ideological viewpoint. The questions are generally batched in groups of three to cover the three dualities I have mentioned. When you finish the test, please press enter, and then go to an answer page that shows a graphical depiction as well as a raw score of your ideological standing.

For initial diagnostic purposes, you may not want to think too hard about each statement when you first go through the test but rather provide your immediate gut-level response. Then you may wish to go back through the survey and do the exact opposite. Click on the "outside links" and I take you to a page that explicitly explains the rationale and references that support the composition and response ranges behind each question. I also provide a detailed narrative overview to justify my approach to creating this survey in my Resolving Opposing Ideological Viewpoints series.

The internal scoring formula for the quiz is based upon answering all thirty questions. If you answer fewer questions and leave the remainder blank, your results will be diluted by the unanswered questions.

The test is meant to be an education in itself. Acquiring the ability to use the analytical process of sorting out ideological arguments based on the dualities used in this survey may actually be more important in the long run than ones particular ideological beliefs at the current moment.

As a result of this kind of analysis, you may be surprised at the extent to which Americans have been deceived by an unholy partnership of central government self-aggrandizement, national media disinformation, and criminal leadership intrigue.

 

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