Amerika

Humans live by fictions that offer partial truths as a way of making the world more comprehensible. One of those is “free will,” or the idea that we deliberately choose paths forward instead of rationalizing the actions triggered by our impulses after the fact.

Among humans, those who are least likely to rationalize are the sanest.

The rest respond to impulses — desires, appetites, emotions, symbols, fears — and then rationalize or write backwards a theory of why they did it. Nietzsche nails this with his free will analysis that is critical of the neurotic intellect:

The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence. For this pride contains within itself the most flattering estimation of the value of knowing. Deception is the most general effect of such pride, but even its most particular effects contain within themselves something of the same deceitful character.

As a means for the preserving of the individual, the intellect unfolds its principal powers in dissimulation, which is the means by which weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves – since they have been denied the chance to wage the battle for existence with horns or with the sharp teeth of beasts of prey. This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in man. Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself — in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity — is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.

They are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see “forms.” Their senses nowhere lead to truth; on the contrary, they are content to receive stimuli and, as it were, to engage in a groping game on the backs of things.

Not that more than one in ten thousand people can even read and understand this at a basic level, but it reminds us of the problem of committees, crowds, and democracies: people avoid the risky big issues and focus on the symbolic and emotional smaller issues instead, creating a snowball effect of reality denial.

As it turns out, this rationalization is necessary for expediency but fails on non-emergency tasks because it, too, snowballs, leading to reality-denial in the individual:

Rationalization occurs when a person has performed an action and then concocts the beliefs and desires that would have made it rational. Then, people often adjust their own beliefs and desires to match the concocted ones.

More generally, rationalization belongs to the broader class of representational exchange mechanisms, which transfer information between many different kinds of psychological representations that guide our behavior. Representational exchange enables us to represent any information in the manner best suited to the particular tasks that require it, balancing accuracy, efficiency, and flexibility in thought.

As it turns out, rationalization has a salient advantage: computationally, it is quick:

People rationalize the choices they make when confronted with difficult decisions by claiming they never wanted the option they did not choose. Behavioral studies on cognitive dissonance provide evidence for decision-induced attitude change, but these studies cannot fully uncover the mechanisms driving the attitude change because only pre- and post-decision attitudes are measured, rather than the process of change itself…These findings suggest the characteristic rationalization processes that are associated with decision-making may be engaged very quickly at the moment of the decision, without extended deliberation and may involve reappraisal-like emotion regulation processes.

Cognitive dissonance and rationalization explain the human tendency for symbolic/emotional thought over structural/analytical thinking, especially that rare type which combines creativity with analysis. The fiction of “free will” is simply our attempt to avoid realizing this.

Tags: cognitive dissonance, crowdism, free will, friedrich w. nietzsche, rationalization, symbolism