Amerika

As part of recognizing that we live in an Age of Symbolism that has lasted for thousands of years, we face the fact that humans tend to project or make assumptions using categorical logic and rationalize from those, making a self-deluding species.

It turns out that not only are we self-deluding, but in groups we intensify this delusion by reacting to each other instead of focusing on the road ahead. In particular, we tend to become extremist over issues we do not understand:

It appears to occur because being conflicted about political issues can feel psychologically uncomfortable, making extreme actions more appealing. Notably, this emerged when people thought ambivalence was justified, whereas leading them to consider ambivalence unjustified suppressed the effect, suggesting that ambivalent people are coping with but not necessarily trying to reduce their ambivalence. These results highlight the interplay of affective and cognitive influences in extreme behavior, showing that beliefs people feel justifiably conflicted about can promote extremism.

People find issues that they do not understand to be baffling, and therefore have no clear take, which makes them prone to choose an extreme simply to have what seems like a solid and complete viewpoint. That way, they can feel better about themselves, and rationalize what they are doing as good.

Humans tend to use categories to imply equality between objects in the world, and from that rationalize that the behavior of each of those objects must be identical. This allows humans to feel they have control of their world, and they rationalize inconsistent results as the result of interference instead of natural variety.

It turns out that humans, once they have made an assumption, cannot understand any alternative to it as anything but a variety of it. Humans see negation as negotiating, as it would be in a human social group, not actual difference:

Here, the researchers found that participants took longer to interpret phrases with negation than they did phrases without negation — indicating, not surprisingly given the greater complexity, that negation slows down our processing of meaning. In addition, drawing from how the participants moved their cursors, negated phrases were first interpreted as affirmative (i.e., “not hot” was initially interpreted as closer to “hot” than to “cold”), but later shifted to a mitigated meaning, suggesting that, for instance, “not hot” is not interpreted as either “hot” or “cold,” but, rather, as something between “hot” and “cold.”

This means that once we have an assumption it becomes the archetype from which everything else is sculpted. However, this introduces ambivalence, and therefore extremism, which means that whatever comes after the initial assumption makes humans uneasy.

This process of making negations into variations of their objects follows the process of rationalization: if the initial theory is right, exceptions do not exist, so we rationalize them into variations of the original. This creates a binary between loyalty to the original assumption and desire for the variation to absorb its ancestor.

Not surprisingly, this leads to antidemocratic democracy because ambivalence introduces extremism which creates polarity:

Globally, [d]emocracies have primarily been dying at the hands of their own voters, who appreciate democracy but fear the other party so much that they will allow antidemocratic action to keep their side in power.

As said elsewhere, all ideologies become totalitarian with enough power because as they become the original assumption, variations must be rationalized as part of them, which creates ambivalence that can only be quelled through mental control.

In the age of symbolism, humans are warring against symbols in their own heads, attempting to enforce rationality where nature has greater textural variation. This ensures not only human destruction, but democracy consuming itself like an ouroboros because its destruction is written in its assumptions, albeit in opposite form.

Tags: democracy, extremism, negation, projection, rationalization