The contracture and expansion of ideas

In the older days, in some unknown time, an unknown person infected by the same germ of static curiosity that infects me today, thought about a hypothesis which made a lot of sense at that time. The reason why women recovering from childbirth died more often than other women was because they had their vitality drained from them during childbirth. They gave a part of their soul to the child and that resulted in deficient "soul material". As a result they could not resist the evil influence of "death spirits" going around in the world. The "death spirits" preyed on weakened souls. Given the line of thinking and multiple simple experiments, however ill designed, people decided to contract the world around the post partum woman to save her life. Gradually other statically or dynamically curious beings restricted the world more and more around the woman. Another person posed that after the birth of a child the woman had her bones in a dilated position which gave the cold, a chance to get to "get in". As a result they could get catch a chest cold.

It is an interesting debate whether the idea propagated by itself as an independent entity or events acted as a catalyst on the right substrate to give a chemical reaction. Whatever the case, the idea that began at some point expanded and took a life of its own. It mutated and as a result of this idea the world contracted for the post partum woman. Some people would justify that this expansion of the idea and the contraction of world for the new mother is probably there to protect the mother. It would seem an evolutionary requirement for the idea to expand so that the new mother is saved to reproduce again.

If we observe the mechanics of the expansion of idea, we will observe that generalization is the main mechanism that makes ideas expand. Once one etiology gains credence the other etiology like it also seems more plausible. The idea grows thus. The witches burnt at the stakes is an excellent example of the idea generalizing like wild fire.

The same fundamental expansion on one scale and a contraction on another works whether we consider medical myths, jungian archetypes, religious thoughts on the larger scale or we consider the dynamics of paranoia, guilt or anxiety on the smaller scale.