I also believe that people – well, some of them – are able to change their minds if presented with the right arguments at the right time, in the appropriate manner and in auspicious circumstances.
People are not robots. And, for certain, not rational!
We are rationalizers. We use rational arguments to fortify our already held conclusions. And the more we love those conclusions, the further we go in our quest to find the ‘right’ arguments in our favor.
But given enough time and if the arguments which contradict our convictions are presented in an un-injurious way, we might be persuaded.
And here’s the catch.
For quite a while now, some of those familiar with how rationalization works have used their knowledge about the innards of our minds to further their own goals.
Nothing wrong with that?
Are you familiar with ‘divide et impera’?
That’s the strategy used by every would be dictator to breed trouble in the population they planed to take over.
Divide and conquer. Make your followers despise everybody else. To the tune of transforming ‘the others’ into sub-humans.
Make your followers believe they are ‘special’ while the others, all of them, are nothing but vermin.
‘And what’s wrong with believing yourself to be rational?!?’
It’s not wrong. Only delusional.
Making your mind up only after carefully considering all of the available ‘arguments’ means having a scientific attitude.
You know? Science, the fad currently popular among many of us…
The problem with the scientific attitude being the fact that this attitude has been developed in the context of hard facts. The scientific attitude has been ‘minted’ by those studying physics, chemistry, biology… fields where every minute transgression becomes evident in real time! Where people could not ‘fall in love’ with their own conclusions. For the simple reason that those conclusions had to be changed along with the new facts continuously discovered in the process of learning.
The concept of rationality had been minted late in the development of human thought.
Sometimes during the XVIII-th and the XIX-th centuries. When philosophers had started to concern themselves with ‘how we think’ on top of ‘what we should be thinking’.
When philosophers – and lately psychologists – have started to understand how we reach/build meaning.
Some of those philosophers have reached rather strange conclusions.
Nietzsche posited that ‘God is dead’ while Marx rationally convinced himself, and others, that there was a way – and only one way, his – to make everybody happy.
Nietzsche opened the gate and Marx led us through.
And now, that we’re dwelling in no-God’s land, everything is up for grabs.
Including reason…
What is here to prevent us from using our knowledge of how mind works in order to further our own, personal, goals?
Goethe did warn us.
The Sorcerer Apprentice made the very same mistake. Overconfidence in his own ability to ‘play the rules’. To fidget with reality.
The difference between Goethe’s poem and what we’re currently doing is the fact that Goethe’s was a work of fiction while we’re playing with our own future.
I’ll wrap up highlighting the extreme perversity of the message.
‘I have a mental illness…’
Loosely translated, this means that everybody who doesn’t follow those arguments to the same conclusion where I have arrived myself must be (also) mentally ill.
And now, that we’ve reached the conclusion that at least one of us is ‘crazy’, it no longer matters who is on the ‘wrong’ side of the fence!
We both are!
We no longer see eye to eye. Each of us is convinced that the other is sick.
Unworthy!
We’re both ready to be taken over.
The only way out is to start listening, respectfully, to what the other has to say.
‘Respectfully’ means, first and fore-most, ‘don’t mess with GIGO‘!
