Ted asks:
> Why is it in anyone's rational self-interest "to establish and maintain one's identity as a 'cool' and popular person"?
Because Western culture demands the maintenance of identrity to fuel desire to fuel consumption to keep capitalism going.
As for authority, Western/Abrahamic culture outsourced its authority function by creating the notion of God. This outsourcing continues with the creation of "authorities" who are turned to for validation instead of people looking inside their own minds and carefully observing the world to determine how things work and what is moral.
Theory is necessary for human beings. Just as a computer has an operating system, so an individual must have some way of negotiating the world. This interaction of theory and lving would be mutually enhancing. Thus both theory and life would both be in perpetual formation, reducing the credibility of those who claim to have THE answer or theory in an attempt to dominate.
One of my first encounters with Chomsky's thinking was an interview he gave on HIV. I have always like this particular exchange:
Q: It’s in the nature of science to seek to quantify and qualify discoveries. HIV is only a theory, from the very beginning it was said to be impossible to isolate. Does the media generally not articulate uncertainty?
NC: I don’t understand what it means to say X "is only a theory," whether X is HIV, evolution, quantum physics, set theory, or whatever. The word "only" seems out of place. One of the ways to try to understand the world is to construct explanatory theories, as best we can. In empirical inquiry, that’s the most that can be achieved. Whether the theory of X is a good one or not is always a fair question, but we should not confuse the issue by saying that it is "only a theory".
Brian Dauth Queer Buddhist Resister