I don't think I've ever heard anyone (outside of the first two years of college or so) deny that there are writings that are either outright dangerous, or at least need some context in order to be consumed safely.
> I don't think I've ever heard anyone
I don't think I could go two weeks of listening to popular discourse on politics without hearing it. It usually occurs right after one side pretends rebut the other side's arguments sincerely, rather than the usual name-calling and other monkey things. I could name numerous examples, but I don't think that would abide the rules here.
If we did live in a world where people readily acknowledged that ideas were occasionally (or even more often than that) dangerous, we'd be much less welcoming of changes to status quos.
> there are writings that are either outright dangerous, or at least need some context in order to be consumed safely
Can you name three?
In the real world, I can't think of any writing that was/is dangerous on its own. There are some texts people colloquially accuse of having historically caused trouble - Mein Kampf comes to mind - but those were arguably just nucleation sites, themselves little but random objects around which preexisting moods and sentiments crystallized.
(I specifically don't want to say "catalyst", because that would imply the writing had to be very specific to the reaction its introduction caused. Nucleation, in contrast, can be trigger by whatever random impurity that happened to be the right size.)
I mean, the continued existence of the Internet kind of disproves the idea of outright dangerous texts.
There are some ideas that if seriously considered can leave many people with radical doubts about the nature of reality, which is dangerous to ones functioning as a normally conditioned human in society. You can acquire ideas by reading, thus, writings can be dangerous.
Of course, social conformity as the criteria for mental health means that existential texts and socially activist texts are both rightly categorized as hazards to the status quo, meaning that repression of ideas will repress both good and bad writings. Liberation theology is in this way as dangerous an idea as brain in a vat radical skepticism or whatever the hell wittgenstein was on about.
>> i've met more than one person muttering about Jung's red book and Kripke's theories of truth, PKD's exegesis, evola, and junger, before disappearing into rehab or homelessness. some ideas are just not healthy recreation, and what they all have in common is a meme complex that causes people to dissociate with all the zeal of a religious conversion but imbued with existential horror. in short, avoid.
> Can you name three?
the parent comment by motohagiography gives 3 examples, quoted above.
i'm not well-informed enough to agree or disagree with motohagiography, but i am interested in your analysis, if that's why you want examples.
Personally, without reading the rest of your comment - because I glimpsed one title that makes the list - these are the things I would tell my child not to read without talking to us first:
- Main Kampf
- Just about anything by Ayn Rand
- This one is a bit of a cop-out because it's very generic, but certain online message boards & Facebook groups. When they're old enough to start browsing on their own - which is probably now, come to think of it - I want to make sure they don't start reading something that reads vaguely plausible on the surface, but quickly plummets into weird racist/fascist rhetoric.
> I mean, the continued existence of the Internet kind of disproves the idea of outright dangerous texts.
I don't think it does, and I would argue that anti-COVID, anti-global-warming, and the other radicalization stuff online is a point to me. Nucleation is a good analogy, I guess, but some people are impressionable enough that they'll glom onto something that'll glow like a horrible pearl in their mind until they think that tampons in the boys' bathroom means that China is, uh, I don't know, turning the frogs gay with Bill Gates' vaccines? I'd wager almost everyone here can personally name one relative who's effectively lost their grip on factual reality in the past five years.
