An idea about why most people are so irrational
r/Pessimism, u/Wanderer974
A serious issue that affects the world’s ability to break out of suffering is that the majority of people are too trusting of their values to see the world with clear eyes. It’s incredible how confident people become in some things. Trusted values are used by people to determine whether an argument is correct or not. Most people grasp that name-calling someone a dummy isn’t a legitimate way to argue with them, but they seem to not really understand the underlying principle – more mature-sounding, normative ad hominem about mental health, personal character, identity politics, etc. sound completely sensible to many people. The one this sub would be familiar with is “there’s not that much suffering in the world; you’re just depressed”.
I have an idea about how things ended up this way. Mainstream human rationality being geared socially and normatively rather than factually could imply that it grew out of subjective social and moral values. In other words, tribal social reasoning. E.g. they’re weird → weird means trouble → nobody trusts them.
While it’s tempting to say this is an evolved trait, and I wouldn’t be surprised, I don’t need to know that to make my point, because humanity doesn’t just inherit the biology of its past generation, it also inherits the cultural values.
In short: normativity is the poor man’s factuality. The lack of concern for rationality and facts in culture comes from a time (most of human history) where factual information was not even available to the average person. All that was available to most people was personal experience, hearsay, and their values.
Farmers living out in the countryside didn’t have newspapers to read, and almost all the people living in the city had, was yellow journalism. So, with facts absent, they relied on normativity and morality to separate truth from falsehood. Any logic was based on these entirely subjective values rather than facts. Truth was decided based on trust (morality and normalness). It was impossible to factually know whether rumors about a president were true or false unless you were one of the privileged few to be associated with the president’s social circle. So the only way to argue about whether the rumors were true or not was by defending and attacking the credibility of the president.
Until very recently, the state of technology was such that substantial concrete evidence for anything was unavailable and essentially a moot point, so decisions were made based on values and social assumptions instead, like «Hmm, is there something “wrong” with this person?». E.g., let’s say that you’re a bunch of tribesmen and someone none of you have ever seen before claims that your town is in danger and you need to flee. The instinct is to judge this person to decide if they’re correct, because there is absolutely no real evidence that something dangerous is coming, so all you can do is rely on social instincts and trust. So trusted shamans could get people to believe in all sorts of things, but outcasts were completely disregarded.
Humanity was molded by a condition of survival where good concrete facts were usually not available (so reliance on facts is an underdeveloped part of our cultural values, and this still haunts us to this day). The problem is that this archaic attitude persists in our culture and is used to make judgements about everything, even though nowadays, there are plenty of situations where there is factual information available.
In general, popular reasoning is still carried by an extreme reliance on ethos, because most people have neither an interest in nor the time for studying many subjects. They evaluate truth by judging the person making the claims according to social norms. There’s really no solution to this problem unfortunately IMO. Ethos is really addictive, and once someone’s hooked on it, it’s hard to get them off. They can dismiss just about any claim with minimal effort while still seeming normal, cool, confident, etc…
Just the curse of being stuck on an Earth of egotistical animals forged by a cruel, blind past: we still live in a world where Trust is Truth.
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See also: Psychological mechanisms that feed the collective illusion