You put your finger on the dark side of weak thinking, alright; fascism is only a few steps away from other sorts of obsessive authoritarian dependency. Over-associating and monotone importances and a failure to understand ramifications can lead to all kinds of hypnotic (not to mention psychotic) conduct like the mass participation in murderous oppression, witch-burning, obsessive parochial views, and so on.

There is risk in both extremes.

Any set of "data" that embraces only part of our total continuum has a boundary on the side of the unknown, and proceeding from the unknown to the partially known to the known about to the known is not a rigid or clinical process. It is more of an engineering process than a "scientific" one , using figures of merit, approximations, indirect estimations, and a deep affection for what seems to work.

The problem we are circling around in this thread is that a great deal of experiential data -- intuition, affection, the upper ends of Maslow's scale -- comes from near that boundary.

As long as we insist on using ONLY material-centric data in approaching the effort to understand thought we will not extend the boundary very much. Excluding experience is a pretty poor way to march into a scientific address of the unknown. On the other hand, accepting all experience as fact is equally dunderheaded especially given the high "creativity" factor with which people persuade themselves, the capacity for self-fulfilling prediction and self-realizing delusions, and so on. This is not a nice well-behaved zone of inquiry like the latent heat of frozen water or the acceleration caused by gravity. It is highly plastic.

The challenge is in sorting out which "datums" are more factual, and especially which datums are important, and why, in amongst a huge sea of opinions, fantasies, apparitions, legacy legends, and real events.

A