Guest post: So you rationalize
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Never mind Ukraine what about trans people?
It’s probably not helpful to make this about intelligence. I have been interested in cults for a while now*, and one particularly pernicious myth is that only weak or stupid people (or at the very least people who suffer from other major problems) join cults, when in fact cults are usually not interested in “damaged goods”: They are mainly interested in strong, healthy, intelligent, highly functional people who can go out there and recruit others (not a simple task!) and put down countless hours of voluntary work (including some highly specialized tasks that require great skill and competence) for the cults. In fact, I seem to remember former cult-member turned anti-cult activist and exit-counselor Steven Hassan once saying that when he was recruiting for the Moonies back in the 1970s, the ideal recruit was someone who thought they were too clever to be recruited by a cult. So, at the risk of sounding like a tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy nut, that’s what they (i.e. cult recruiters) want you to think. It’s a mindset that only works in the cults favor and to your disadvantage.
It’s not just that being that overconfident means your guard is down and you’re less vigilant. But, perhaps more importantly, if you’re that invested in your self-image as too clever to be recruited by a cult, then, if the cult can just get you to make some small concessions (perhaps in your sleep-deprived state at four o clock in the morning after hours of relentless guilt-tripping and peer-pressure), you are that much more prone to rationalize it. The idea that perhaps you weren’t too clever after all simply doesn’t compute (think “Syntax error”, think “This program has performed an illegal operation and is shutting down”, think the “Blue screen of death”), so if you did make those concessions it had to be the smart, rational, clever thing to do: “Only a weak-minded dolt could be persuaded to make such concessions because of peer pressure and simple sleazy sales-techniques. But I’m not a weak-minded dolt, and I did make those concessions. Therefore it had to be the smart, rational, clever thing to do!”
So you rationalize, i.e. you come up with some spurious, after the fact justification for why making those concessions were the smart, rational, clever thing to do. And of course, once made, those rationalizations don’t just exist in a vacuum: They now become part of the lens through which you view every other question. The same rationalizations used to justify concessions a,b,c make it very difficult to resist concessions d,e,f without looking inconsistent and hypocritical even to yourself (practically the definition of cognitive dissonance). And if the inconsistency and hypocrisy is not immediately obvious to you, you can be damned sure the cult leader (as well as every other person in the room) is going to point it out to you: “We didn’t force you to make these concessions! You have agreed that this is the right way to look at it! These are your own words! By your own logic, you should be making concessions d,e,f, and yet you won’t? I see… so that’s what your word is really worth etc.. etc…”
So you get caught in the logic of your own rationalizations (what some have called a “justification spiral”): Going back and admitting you shouldn’t have made concessions a,b,c leads to cognitive dissonance (i.e. “syntax error”/”illegal operation”/”Blue screen of death”), but staying where you are and going no further leads to charges of inconsistency and hypocrisy and hence more cognitive dissonance. The only way to go is forward, and so you make concessions d,e,f which, by the same logic, make it very hard to resist concessions g,h,i etc… etc… In the end, by the time you get to x,y,x, even forcing Kool-Aid mixed with cyanide down your children’s throats with syringes before drinking it yourself may appear less unacceptable than admitting to yourself “I have dedicated my life to an unworthy cause and a lie. And not only that, I have recruited others, and they are now in this same mess because of me. I have told malicious lies about others for telling the truth about the vicious cult I’m in. I have done inexcusable things and gotten my hands irredeemably dirty, all in the service of a lying megalomaniac, a psychopath, and a monster.” There is more too it, but ultimately I think this is how you get caught. This is when the cult owns you.
I think highly educated and intelligent people are often the easiest people to recruit, in part precisely because they think they’re too smart to be recruited, but also because their intelligence makes them even better at rationalization (according to Joachim Fest the one truly brilliant mind of the 3rd Reich was Josef Goebbels). Even back in my movement skeptic days I thought skeptics tended to over-emphasize logical fallacies and under-emphasize heuristics and biases, cognitive dissonance and rationalization, motivated reasoning and wishful thinking etc. It always seemed to be implicitly assumed that those things were limited to the “true believers” while skeptics were immune to that kind of thing. If you’re that surprised that people like Solnit and Myers could be persuaded to drink the Kool-Aid, it might mean it’s time to look closer at some of your own assumptions.
* I recently finished reading Tim Reiterman’s biography of Jim Jones The Raven. A real world horror-story if ever there was one!
** The cult Aum Shinrikyo, infamous for the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, disproportionally recruited scientists.
Since Solnit says JKR is a “notorious transphobe” etc., I would guess that she is ignorant of what JKR has said and what she stands for. The intelligent thing to do would be to find out, and not parrot the TRA crowd. Of course intelligent people can be ignorant, everyone has blind spots. Given that, I would agree about the general susceptibility of people with average intelligence *who overestimate their intelligence*, but the truly clever people; those who are resistant to cult recruiting, groupthink, propaganda, emotional bias, rationalization, etc. aren’t so gullible, they doubt, question, analyze. I don’t agree with the idea that people with above average intelligence are so easily fooled. Also, being trained as a scientist doesn’t guarantee above average intelligence, as it’s a specific type of method that is learned, some better at it than others. Trivial knowledge, such as remembering brute facts about things (like spiders), does not equate with superior reasoning ability, logical thought, conceptual analysis, or common sense. I suppose I generally disagree that it’s not mostly about intelligence, but that depends on what kind of intelligence we’re talking about.
The only way to be (sort of) “resistant” to group-think and cultishness is to be a loner.
Not to belong to any “group”. It means surrendering a modicum of power for independence of thought.
You have nothing. But at least no one can tell you what to do or think. It’s a lonely place.
Example: my husband and I have not been enrolled in any US political party for decades. We don’t participate in any “gay” activities. I even eschew atheist groups.
If I had to identify as anything, it would be as an expatriate African ape, a Darwinian.
Bjarte, this is absolutely brilliant. I’ll have to bookmark this because I’m sure I’ll be referring to it frequently.
Graham Linehan talks about this same phenomenon all the time, but from a slightly different angle: he says that con artists love New Yorkers because New Yorkers are so high on their own superiority they think they’re too clever to be conned. The perfect marks, in other words.
(Maybe that’s why so many of the staff at The New Yorker have been so utterly fooled by the gender identity con.)
Let’s put it in terms of a scientific query with observable scientific results: Premise: Women bear children and men do not. — How many transwomen have the potential to become pregnant with, give birth to, and breast feed a child? – 0.00% How many women have this potential? – Fertility rates vary, but it’s far higher than 0.00%, and from a brief investigation it’s closer to 90%. Here’s the tricky part, drawing conclusions. Some scientists are better than others at drawing conclusions, and it doesn’t take much intelligence at all to draw a simple and accurate conclusion from these questions, but if someone can’t, I wouldn’t regard them as very intelligent, nevermind “highly.”
Mike B @2 I’m not sure independent thinking is such a rarefied thing, I know of some very bright people who are as social as anyone else, they just think for themselves. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don’t think a lack of intelligence or an inability to reason is why people exhibit cult-like behavior. I think it’s simply a consequence of picking a side to be on. Once one has done that, it’s a commitment that isn’t easily changed without consequences. Look at how Liz Cheney declared after 1/6/2021 that Trump had tried to overthrow the election of Biden, and how she has since been ostracized by the Republican Party, which has picked the side of Trump. All the polling showing that people believe the 2020 election was “stolen” isn’t because people have reasoned themselves into believing it based on the evidence, it’s because they were on the side of Trump and that’s all they need to know.
Now if the side one is on is somehow utterly discredited in some way, then one is then free to think differently. But until then, people will cling to their side and maintain their beliefs accordingly in order to stay on the right side. The only difference intelligence makes is to better enable motivated reasoning to support one’s chosen side.
Philosopher’s can know better of course, but as we’ve seen in the case of Kathleen Stock, there are plenty of philosophers in academia who have picked their side and go the “no debate” route even though that is contrary to what their profession stands for. Same thing goes for skeptics who claim that debate is a waste of time despite the fact that skepticism is all about questioning assumptions and pointing out mistaken beliefs. Nope, TWAW is the whole of the law when that’s the side you’re on and that’s that.
Good identification. Fits how I look at myself. My husband and I are both loners, and we follow slightly different news feeds, so are able to add information to each other’s knowledge about the world, such as it is. He is not a scientist, but is capable of the highly organized thinking scientists are trained in. I am a scientist, but my background in the arts gives me additional views of the world (many of which I do not like; the theatre community is deep in trans ideology) .
I think of getting into an ideology like this as being like falling in activated sludge. You cannot swim out of activated sludge.
Great explanation. Fits in very nicely with discussions about the fallacy of free will. Having a strong predilection for neurodeterminism I agree that we give ourselves too much credit for rational thinking.
A related post: https://farcornercafe.blogspot.com/2022/03/multimedia.html, tried to make a similar point but as usual for me, less clearly ;)
I also did a big post (lots of images!) on neuroplasticity back in January, as a prelude for this kind of argument. An area of interest of mine is trying to link neuro-structural concepts with processes like rationalization, etc.
Back in my own skeptic movement days I heard this theme often : thinking you’re too smart to be fooled means you’re more likely to be fooled. Bias, prejudice, and rationalization were all part of the human condition. It wasn’t a matter of just being smart and knowledgeable or stupid and ignorant. There is no Us and Them.
I heard that because that’s what I was hoping and expecting to hear. Those are the talks I remember, the articles that impressed me, and the little sayings I copied and pasted into a file. Bjarte’s right, too. There was plenty of We are not like Them thinking — but I skimmed over that part to fasten on what reinforced what I already believed.
The description of how Smart People slowly join cults sounds very likely. I’m guessing that, with Genderism, the a, b, c that were initially agreed to didn’t come from the science, atheist, skeptic toolbox, but from the social justice one.
twiliter
By that standard, I strongly suspect there are no intelligent people. As I said in the original thread, intelligence, analytic skills etc. are tools, and a tool doesn’t decide how we use it, we do. Having the intellectual tools to know that something is bullshit doesn’t get you very far if you’re not motivated to use them that way. It’s the motivation that’s lacking, and not the brainpower.
Sometimes it actually takes quite a bit of intelligence and ingenuity to get from seemingly hopeless premises to a desired conclusion, e.g. say you got into this seemingly (at the time) benign group out of a sincere desire to do good, and you end up going out day after day to raise money supposedly to help starving people in the 3rd World, all the while knowing that every cent will be spent on making a corrupt multi-millionaire even more stinking rich and help him buy yet another Rolls Royce or yacht or mansion. How can anyone possibly rationalize something like that?
Easy! “Just giving money to the poor might help feed them for one day, but they will be no better off tomorrow. In order to make a real improvement, what’s really needed is a complete transformation of the whole society. The Great Leader is the only one who can make the changes necessary, but in order to do so he must have access to the rich and powerful, and in order to get access to the rich and powerful he must appear to be rich and powerful himself. The Great Leader doesn’t care for material possessions but it’s a necessary evil to etc… etc…” This is the kind of things cult members tell themselves, because the alternative is just too devastating to even consider.
Artymorty #3
Thank you :)
Back in the 1960s I knew one of the people who became close to the Rev. Jim Jones and was for a while a leading member of the People’s Temple. Not a stupid or weak person.
It occurs to me that maybe hostility is a better safeguard against stumbling into culty thinking than the whole skepticism / cleverness / rationality / critical thinking cluster. Or that maybe you need both. Or that anyway a touch of hostility comes in handy sometimes.
It did for me, at any rate, back in summer 2015. The more PZ’s “horde” screamed at me the more I despised them, and the less inclination I felt to sit around waiting for more of it. The cognitive part of it was definitely there – “All this is obviously a fiction, I might be able to go along with the fiction but I can’t pretend it’s not a fiction, and I don’t get how you can” – but so was the “fuck all of you and the horse you rode in on.”
I think the skeptical community has erred in believing that a reduction in religious practice was accompanied by a reduction in religious thinking. Doesn’t appear to be the case. Transactivism is a classic example. Start with a healthy desire to accommodate another group of people and an awareness of the fact that conservatism has frequently been used as a cover for bigotry and you have the seeds of a new line of religious thinking.
People love religious thinking. It makes them feel special. It makes them feel superior. It makes them feel like they alone are in the know. It makes them feel right. Once you feel right, it’s not a big stretch to dismiss objections to the revealed truth. And dismiss those who object. And as you are right it makes the others wrong. Their objections are an attack on righteousness not informed debate. That makes them evil. How dare they argue? Religious thinking puts a period on a topic, which provides comfort since most people are very uncomfortable with uncertainty.
The converse is that once religious thinking provides the answer, further debate is impossible. To concede even a single point threatens to bring the whole house of cards down around the believer. Absolute truth cannot abide exception – otherwise it’s not absolute. Think about all those ontological creationist arguments. Believers rationalize any counterargument while ignoring the fact that any exception invalidates any absolute logical claim.
Religious thinking also has the advantage of being able to depend on rhetoric and bullying. Sound bites beat facts 9 times out of 10. Truth seekers have to rely on facts. Bullying isn’t really bullying after all – it’s simply the cleansing of apostates who deserve what they get.
And so it goes for transactivism – to hell with nuanced arguments. It’s too hard. Better to simply accept all claims instead of having to figure out the how to properly contextualize transgenderism into the Pantheon of human experience.
Bjarte @10 Right! Beam me up Scotty, there’s no inelligent life down here. :D
I’m not convinced that PZ fell in with the cult; I think that he consciously chose his public position. He has financial and social motivations to do it, and I’m just cynical enough to believe that those are enough to guide his behavior even if he doesn’t believe in all the nonsense, in private.
Ophelia @13 I don’t know how you could have gone along with the prevailing BS back then, but I’m glad you didn’t. I think that you’re right about hostility, some of the BS is infuriating and disagreement is not very, um, agreeable. :D
I too am not convinced PZ fell in with the cult. I think it’s entirely possible he just decided since he had to pick a side it would be less hassle to pick the cult one without actually believing in its doctrine.
@18 Picking a side without believing in it sounds dishonest.
Well, yes. It sounds dishonest and is dishonest. Sometimes it’s better to be dishonest – things like not telling a friend or your child or a stranger on the bus “You’re ugly” even if it’s true. Some of that is involved in this whole dispute, because it’s considered “hurtful” to say people aren’t the other sex. It probably is, but there isn’t any general expectation that we have to humor people’s fantasies so as not to be hurtful. It’s just this one fantasy, and after all this time I still don’t see why this one fantasy is so special. Anyway, I don’t know PZ is faking it, I only suspect.
What about telling your child she’s ugly if it’s not true? Is that okay? ;-) (I would say I’m asking for a friend, but that would be lying. It was my mother who told me that…you know, I’ve never quite figured out it’s not true. Intellectually, I know it, but emotionally it’s difficult.)
There are a lot of times when I either keep silent or go with the little white lie because it’s no harm to just not tell someone they’re ugly or they aren’t smart. In fact, I’m not sure I can think of any situation where it’s necessary to tell someone they’re ugly. There might be times it’s necessary to tell someone they’re smart.
But when it comes to telling the person with the penis that the men’s room is over there, and he is in the wrong one…that is an important truth that needs to be said for the protection of women. Even if he is not a predatory male and ‘just wants to pee’ as Veroniachel McIvy is fond of saying, he still doesn’t belong in the women’s room.
“But when it comes to telling the person with the penis that the men’s room is over there, and he is in the wrong one…”
Maybe “restrooms,” instead of being labeled MEN, WOMEN, or with those silly stick figure placards, should be labeled instead
PENISES
VAGINAS
I wonder if that would help?
I think it’s a fair analogy, except that biological sex is objective, and the whole beauty in the eye thing… I wonder if trans people really get hurt feelings about it or if it’s just part of the charade.
Dammit, typo @15 too. Surely there’s no ineligible life… :P
Mike @22 What about “bottom surgery” recipients… I still vote for third spaces or single occupancy.
twiliter,
Yeah, I see the trend toward single occupancy happening, which is no skin off my . . . nose.
I don’t think prominent atheist/ skeptic/humanists are pretending or being strategic. I suspect they’re convinced that an atheist/skeptic/humanist is exactly the sort of clear-headed, cynical, and compassionate person who will recognize that Genderism makes sense.
A. Black-white thinking is the sign of a primitive mind.
B. Nature is messy & complicated, without neat divisions.
C. Listen to people who tell you about themselves.
D. Obvious, common sense assumptions are often overthrown by science.
E. Look at who disagrees, that can tell you a lot.
F. Atheism & skepticism are worth nothing if they’re not fighting for social justice.
G. Being “rational” is often a way to ignore people.
H. The atheist/skeptic/humanist movement has a serious problem of too many assholes.
I. Being trans is like being gay.
J. The same arguments used against gay ppl are used against trans ppl.
K.There are studies, ppl dismiss them like creationists.
The cumulative effect is persuasive. It’s not that they think they’re smarter; they think they’re better at seeing the big picture, synthesizing heart & head by pulling on experience.
Questions like “what is a woman?” are small, narrow questions like asking why, if we came from monkeys, there are still monkeys? It denotes ignorance. They are enormous: they contain multitudes.
Yeah, we’re hearing this in education, too. The idea that a child (or young adult, like I teach) knows more about the best way to teach them and to test them than experienced teachers do. Because they know best about themselves. I’m calling bullshit on that one. While there are things about myself I know and no one else does, there are things they know about me that I don’t.
Is the doctor supposed to let them diagnose themselves? When trans is involved, yes. This shows up the ridiculousness of the ideology, because there is NO WAY a six year old knows more about themselves than their pediatrician, than their mother and father, and so forth.
I am willing to listen to people who tell me I’m not as smart as I think I am, that I’m being too grouchy, and so forth. I may not accept what they say, but I am willing to allow them to present their side, and I will try to consider it. I will not, however, listen to anyone who tells me I am not an otter. I feel like an otter. TOAO.
Sastra:
I think about head vs. heart a lot. The problem is the heart has incredible persuasive powers over the head. Passions are called passions for a reason: they’re passionate! They’re especially good at dividing us into tribes, thems and us-es. No matter how rational someone purports to be, if he’s already picked a side, and he’s got an emotional investment in it (like, say, loyalty to gay rights and a belief in justice and being kind to people), and he perceives that an argument is coming from the other side, his heart is going to do everything in its power to stop his head from engaging with it.
It might be the case that PZ Myers neither believes nor disbelieves in genderology, because his heart is blocking his head from engaging critically with the question at all. His heart picked a side and if you’re on the other side his heart is at war with you, and there’s no way it’s going to let your argument threaten to make its possessor into a turncoat by getting him thinking about it.
Brainwashing should be called heartwashing, because it’s the heart, not the brain, that gets hijacked.
You see this with Scientologists. The indoctrination process starts out all emotion, no reason. First they show you love and attention, then they tell you they’re going to fix all your troubles, they give you some mild therapy that feels good, then they tell you they’re on a mission to save the world and you can be a part of it. You might spend several months in Scientology without even knowing how exactly you’re saving the world other than by getting more people to join the group (and of course giving them all your money), but your heart has already been washed: you know you’re with a good team that’s doing good things. They got your heart to pick their side and your heart will take care of your brain for them.
Ex-Scientologists will tell you how they used to just block out any criticisms, they just refused to engage with core questions like, “Is this space alien stuff really believable?” simply because they felt that Scientology was good, and that was as far as their critical thinking ever got. You see it when celebrities get ambushed with questions about aliens, they just immediately start shouting at the interviewer for being an evil person. More than one ex-Scientologist has said they neither really believed nor disbelieved in the aliens. Truth and reason — critical thinking — was irrelevant. It was only ever feelings that mattered.
It takes a powerful emotional experience, not deep thinking, to jar a Scientologist out of his heartwashing. (In the director Paul Haggis’s case, it was his love for his gay daughter that made him furious when he discovered the Church’s anti-gay doctrines. Suddenly he could see that the Church weren’t the good guys.)
I think this is the case with genderology, too. That’s why showing images and videos of these men in women’s sport are starting to have an effect on people: they’re emotionally evocative. And it’s also why I think it’s so important for more gays and lesbians to speak up, because so much of the spell of this movement gets its power from people’s emotional loyalty (and guilt over past disloyalty, perhaps) to us.
Public toilets, dunnies, shithouses, rest-rooms, wash-rooms, lavatories, thunderboxes, pissoirs, shittoirs; call them what you will, are traditionally designed with provision of privacy in mind. Thus, to draw an ecological analogy, they create a niche for the predator, which biological men presenting as women (BMPAWs – to add something to the current alphabet soup) are eager to argue is both wrong and illusory. Vide the article below.
I can understand a biological male who presents to the world as a woman (a BMPAW) having such concerns. But the reality is that the ecological niche for the male rapist who decides to camouflage as a woman is being constructed as we blog, and will be entered, taken up and occupied in due course; if not already. ‘Nice little parlour we have here,’ said the spider to the fly.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/02/fears-gender-neutral-toilets-women-trans-people-violence
Not toilets, changing rooms, but:
Unisex changing rooms put women in danger
To state the bleedingly obvious, toilets and changing rooms are part of a subset of spaces in which people (and especially women and girls) are more vulnerable than usual. That was the main reason for creating spaces dedicated to single sex use. Part of that vulnerability comes about from being in a naked or partially naked state, but not all of it. It’s not like you walk out of the toilet cubicle naked after all. It’s because the ante-spaces themselves are quite isolated – away from public view, frequented only by people there to use them, and often acoustically isolated as well.
Other spaces that are similar in that respect can be parts of parks and gardens, parking building, isolated foot and cycle paths, underpass tunnels etc. Pretty much any space that can become visually isolated represents a danger point for the vulnerable.
In urban planning and architecture it has long been best practice to consider that. You ensure lighting is adequate at night and that pathways and connecting links enable both users and casual passersby to have a clear field of view from one area to another. You reduce not just the fact of visual and acoustic isolation, but the sense of it as well. I remember a couple of decades ago reading about a rape in a small pocket park in our capital city. There were people walking past literally metres on the other side of some plants, but the victim was unaware of that busy footpath and believed themselves to be beyond help in an isolated area.
Unisex cubicles per se are not the problem. the issue comes from having the unisex cubicles in a location where there is visual and acoustic privacy in a seldom frequented part of a building or place and with a mix of males and females.
The solution is remarkably easy. Design public toilets so that they face into an easily viewed and preferably busy area. Why doesn’t this happen more frequently?
– Because we have a lot of existing building stock and don’t actually build that many new public buildings every year.
– Because changing the internal layout of buildings with mass plumbing is very expensive.
– Because we have a pre-conceived idea of how public buildings should be laid out.
– Because building owners and users want to prioritise ‘prime’ public space for purposes other than toilets.
– Because when a toilet is very close to, even immediately adjacent to the public space you have to get acoustic isolation, ventilation, and visual privacy just right. All of that costs significant money.
Our building codes, priorities, and social expectations do not prioritise women’s safety.