And, it’s the dangerous thing about Hollywood and all the rest of the entertainment complex: They model a behavior and reality set that doesn’t really exist, and people keep looking for that in real life.

Human beings are monkey-see, monkey-do pattern-recognition and pattern-reproduction machines, in a lot of respects. You encounter a situation, your subconscious goes back to like situations that you’ve observed, reads the script of that moment in time, evaluates it, picks the role you’re playing, and you start acting it out.

You see this all the time in families; the kids exhibit the same behaviors as the parents did, when they’re adults in their own relationships, following the same basic scripts mom and dad modeled. If they work, all to the good–If they don’t…?

You also see it in the military, where guys who are put into positions where they’ve got no experience start modeling what they might have seen in movies and TV. The odd thing is, they may well have been in and observed positive “scripts” for how to deal with situations they get into, but for some damn reason, the negative ones that they might have seen in an entertainment are the ones that stick.

One of these things that I’ve often observed and puzzled at is the “stickiness” of bad information. People hear, for example, from “Unkah Mikey, the Vietnam veteran” that Mattel made a close replica toy of the M16, and that Unkah Mikey had one as a kid. Ten years later, that’s conflated into “Mattel made the M16, and my Uncle Mike, the Vietnam War Hero, had one in the ‘Nam…”. No matter what you do, no matter what information you present in refutation, and even if Uncle Mike shows up and tells PFC Timmay that no, he did not have a roll-marked M16 in Vietnam, PFC Timmay is still gonna believe and pass on that old soldier’s story about the Mattel M16.

And, as a trainer or instructor…? LOL… Dude, just learn to deal with it. There’s a law of nature, when it comes to bad information, and you’re never going to be able to overcome it. I will be damned if I understand why, either–It doesn’t seem to be correlated with much of anything, and stems from multiple sources with multiple means of transmission. Analyzing the how and the why of what people remember and then what they seemingly deliberately forget in the name of narrative and/or fantasy is something that will drive rational men mad.

Better we all suffer in misery rather than a few have more than others.