This isn't what you might think, not another long-winded way of saying that 35-47% of all Americans are idiots, for rejecting mask use during a pandemic, and supporting the worst President in the last 100 years. In fact I'm going to conclude the opposite, that something else entirely is going on. It's not a simple conservative versus liberal narrative either, stopping at saying that blind spots can occur related to "buying in" to that side, or even to both. But it's much closer to that.
I'm going to explain why this one case indicates that personal worldviews, in general, aren't based on reason or rational thought.
My own conclusion is that people are not using reason to the extent they think they are, ever, that our worldviews just aren't based on that. This applies to liberals too.
It will take some doing to hear me out, to follow this, so people with a low tolerance for reading won't make it through it.
I think that we can look at this case and general issue from a different perspective (than blaming a near enough to half proportion of Americans for being stupid), and work back to some assumptions about how our worldviews / personal realities are structured, assumptions that don't "hold up." It would be quite difficult to notice that context issue I'll make a claim about, or to verify it, even if that is true, without a special case highlighting the contradiction.
There are some moving parts to what I'll say that need to be mapped out separately, and I'll try to keep that simple.
1. what a reductio ad absurdum logical form means
2. why anti-mask sentiment and Trump support aren't rational positions
3. what I think led to those irrational positions
4. connecting these perspective issues, absurdity, and worldview structuring
5. what this tells us about the nature of experienced reality (/ personal worldviews)
6. examples of non-rational worldview basis
7. the positive side
1. what a reductio ad absurdum logical form means
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum:
In logic, reductio ad absurdum (Latin for '"reduction to absurdity"'), also known as argumentum ad absurdum (Latin for "argument to absurdity"), apagogical arguments, negation introduction or the appeal to extremes, is the form of argument that attempts to establish a claim by showing that the opposite scenario would lead to absurdity or contradiction.[1][2] It can be used to disprove a statement by showing that it would inevitably lead to a ridiculous, absurd, or impractical conclusion,[3] or to prove a statement by showing that if it were false, then the result would be absurd or impossible.[4][5]
It's not directly how I'm using the concept or form here, because I'm starting from accepting that a line of reasoning (or state of being, really) accepted by many people did actually lead to an absurdity or contradiction, not just that it would lead to one. It's roughly the same thing, just in a different form.
This means that either the assumptions supporting that reasoning were false, or else that steps taken in the reasoning process were invalid. No need to overdo it with wrestling with logical forms or process here; I'll keep it simple enough that you won't need to re-read some Logic 101 content to keep up (or really we might be on a 200 level class with all this, or even in grad class scope, with actually applying it to real life well beyond grad-level studies scope).
The basic theme, the general context for what logic is all about, is that if you start with accurate (true) assumptions and use valid reasoning steps (derivations) then you will get an accurate, valid, or true conclusion. I'm really mixing logic terms and ordinary language framing here, blurring the actual meaning just a bit, but this has to be able to work as both formal logic theory and a description of reality, for what I'm describing.
Their example is this, in that argument in the Wikipedia page description: The Earth cannot be flat; otherwise, we would find people falling off the edge.
That works, right? Lots of other arguments against flat Earth work as well or better, about satellite images, how it works out seeing a ship approach or move away from the shore, the changes in seasons and day lengths, how flight paths and times give you relatively direct experience of different distances around the globe. Let's get back to considering this though, the example form.
There is no edge to the Earth, which can be identified in different ways. It's a little harder to spot how this works since both the initial assumption (the Earth is flat) and the final conclusion, that people could reach the side, or fall off it, are absurd. People have been traveling around the globe in lots of forms for a very long time, so that part is surely false. The assumption that "the Earth is flat" can't be right. Still, it sort of works in that form too, that if there was an edge eventually someone would experience that edge, no matter where it was, and no one ever does. I think the flat-earther maps really try to posit that a frozen wasteland circles the known Earth regions, which doesn't work for a number of different reasons.
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cool enough, error aside (photo credit: https://physicsworld.com/a/fighting-flat-earth-theory/) |
It would be fine to skip ahead to applying this to anti-mask sentiment, without any need for pointing out the absurdity of that (how it's foolish to reject use of that protection during a pandemic), but let's pause there for a short time to get that framing clear.
2. why anti-mask sentiment and Trump support aren't rational positions
Rejecting use of masks as protection during a pandemic is clearly an absurd position. The problem with such a line of reasoning is again clear in the outcome: a substantial proportion of the US population has rejected isolation practices and mask use, resulting in the worst pandemic spread in the world (more or less; considering per-population numbers maybe it's really only one of the worst).
To me the "deaths" stats tell this story better than the case counts, since that's the final, real impact:
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it kept getting worse after that too |
A number of European countries, major developed nations, aren't so far off that stat related to per-100,000 population mortality, but we can still consider the American case separately. I talk to people in different countries on a regular basis, so I do have some feel for what is common and different related to pandemic perspective and routine protections in different places (for example, in Germany, Switzerland, and Sweden), but that would make for a long discussion on its own.
I'm not going to completely justify here that it was in fact refusal to wear masks and practice isolation that "caused" that severity and impact. It was, and people who might think otherwise you just can't reach. This is about why you can't reason with them, why they've set aside logic and common sense entirely, embracing a break from reason. Actually strictly speaking it's not limited to that; I'm also suggesting that the "other half," or everyone in general, never did base their personal reality on reason, although they seem to, or we just naturally assume that they do.
To me all of this works equally well for explaining Trump support in general. As I see it Trump was clearly the worst President of the last 100 years, or at least on a very short list of contenders. He failed to help resolve the pandemic in any way, with his main role in that issue being spreading mis-information, at times even interfering with States' resolution efforts. Stopping support for the WHO during the pandemic works as a clear example, as do 100 other issues, or gaps, cases of failing to do the absolute minimum as a leader. But it will keep this simpler to focus on the pandemic and mask example, since there's already considerable ground to cover.
3. what I think led to those irrational positions
The simple answer: conservative perspective bias. Let's unpack that some before dealing with it directly though.
If you catch a standard "liberal" understanding, or even centrist take, if there was such a thing in the US, anti-mask sentiment and pandemic denial in general leads directly from one main cause: stupidity. Surely there's something to that, but it can't just be that. It could, actually, to a limited extent, but let's break down further what that would mean.
Trump's support base has stuck at between 40 and 45% over the course of his term.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
Different polls pass on different results, with the orange and green shaded spaces representing different points occupied by different results.
It would require citing a lot more poll results to link that to pandemic or mask-use perspective. Just checking a summary of different results about pandemic concerns reveals that's not a direct mapping:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/coronavirus-polls/
We're not seeing 40% of all Americans say the pandemic is nothing to be concerned about, but 30% do say they are "not very" concerned, or "not at all." It's not completely a given that the conservative / liberal mapping that is most definitely connected to that Trump support issue carries over here, but of course it does. Catching the right poll isolating that clearly would take more looking around than I'm going to put into this, but a graph of approval or disapproval of Trump's pandemic response is a step in that direction (again cited in that same source):
81% of all Republicans approve of Trump's handling of the pandemic. As is typical that didn't change at all in relation to the known details of the pandemic changing, or the severity of impact, or the steps that Trump did or didn't take. There essentially was no Federal-level pandemic resolution response at all, and the US fared the worst of any major, developed country in pandemic outcome, so this really works as an example of an absurd situation.
It's not an absurd conclusion to a logical argument, which is a different thing, but in a similar way--I'm arguing, at least--landing on a completely absurd point of view or opinion had to stem from the same kind of problematic reasoning form or assumptions starting point (two completely different things, to be clear).
It's common knowledge that the mapping of Trump support, Trump pandemic response approval, and a lack of concern over pandemic risk all map together, as a broad, interconnected conservative position. If you don't live in the US maybe not, or if you've somehow avoided hearing about Trump and the pandemic over the past year. Good job, if so; but then you couldn't possibly also be reading this, because avoiding such widespread information would take an unusual degree of isolation from mainstream ideas.
Conservative perspective bias is the cause, not stupidity.
I'll give liberals that the two possible root causes (among others?) probably overlap quite a bit, but I can't accept that 40-45% of the US is less intelligent than the rest, that the break-down of conservative political inclination maps directly to intelligence. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some correlation, maybe even a lot of it, but intuitively it absolutely couldn't be that simple. This research paper actually concludes the opposite:
Carl (2014) analysed data from the U.S. General Social Survey (GSS), and found that individuals who identify as Republican have slightly higher verbal intelligence than those who identify as Democrat. An important qualification was that the measure of verbal intelligence used was relatively crude, namely a 10-word vocabulary test. This study examines three other measures of cognitive ability from the GSS: a test of probability knowledge, a test of verbal reasoning, and an assessment by the interviewer of how well the respondent understood the survey questions. In all three cases, individuals who identify as Republican score slightly higher than those who identify as Democrat...
A later work questions some assumptions in that paper and rejects that finding, described as such (in a comment of a separate citation linked to in that page):
... In two recent papers, Carl (2014aCarl ( , 2014b analyzed data from the United States General Social Survey (GSS) and concluded that individuals who identify as Republicans have higher cognitive ability than individuals who identify as Democrats. In the current paper we replicate his analysis using appropriate controls and show that there is no important difference in cognitive ability between Republicans and Democrats. ...
More recent work yet (from 2018, versus 2014 and 2016 for the prior two citations, respectively) shows the opposite trend (with results probably varying significantly based on assumptions and methodology, as indicated even in that last short citation):
..Meisenberg (2015) found that intelligence had, since the 1970s, gradually lost its modest linkage with Republican party identification in the U.S. The combination of these two observations nicely matches the present findings: as economic issues decrease in importance relative to social issues, high-ability voters should increasingly prefer left-wing parties...
One thing seems clear: we simply can't assume that the roughly 40% of the US population who are conservative Americans that support Trump, and almost certainly much more prone to down-play pandemic severity, and to reject mask use, are less intelligent. It's not that the least intelligent 40% of Americans are that Trump support base, so it's easier for them to reject mask use and any CDC advice, for not having the normal (average) degree of capacity to think things through.
Some Trump supporters are in that lower-range intellect group; the image of an overweight American, driving a large pick-up truck with a lot of US flags flying from it, making claims and statements that make no sense, points to a real thing, a population segment. Some of them believe that the coronavirus vaccine has a tracking microchip in it, and so on. But that's just not who that entire 40-45% is; it can't be.
This is a good place for an aside, and example that shows how this works. Some of my family members support Trump, and reject mask use, related to me being from a rural, conservative area in Pennsylvania. My parents are more liberal. Both obtained graduate degrees, both are of well above average intelligence, and they are on the opposite page. But the case of two nephews helps highlight how this is a cultural phenomena, not primarily a cognitive issue (or at least I'm asserting that; the point of reading this is to think it through for yourself, not to accept what I say).
One of my nephews recently posted a video to Facebook of him rejecting mask-use policy at Wal-Mart; really the standard Trump supporter / conservative paradigm. He was probably a bit irate, using profanity, wearing camouflage, not clean-shaven, and so on. I've not seen the video; the last two parts are about how he always looks, with only a description of the rest passed on to me, about his conduct.
Oddly he's in a high-risk group; he was born with a serious heart condition, with only three chambers in his heart, so that getting coronavirus would almost certainly kill him. But he rejects mask use. There is a chance that he has problems breathing with a mask on, because his lung function is greatly reduced by blood-flow issues (not directly related to that organ, but it works out that way). If he was irate because it's not workable for him to wear a mask (which seems unlikely, but at least conceivable), that would be one thing, but more than likely his protest took more a standard "muh freedoms!" direction.
So far just typical, the expected norm, beyond that health-risk twist. He may well be of average intelligence, but given that he had problems in school studies and didn't make it through an attempt at college education he may not be at that level. To some extent that's not really the point.
To back up a bit, it goes without saying that I love my nephew, and do think less of his reasoning ability and perspective in relation to these themes, but in a broader sense I don't think any less of him as a person. Part of how that works will be clearer as I finally get to the point.
His brother did make it through university education, and did well. He probably is of above average intelligence, as their sister is, who also completed that education step. His brother is also conservative, and supports this "anti-mask" position too, while my sister rejects Trump support and pandemic denial, in all forms. The position / conclusions mapping isn't to intelligence, in their cases, it's to conservative political bias. They tend to wear beards, own guns, and all the rest, the standard stereotype. And to support Trump.
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slightly annoying but also funny |
It's a bit of a stretch to extend this case to the entire US status, but I'm not trying to. The studies of intelligence versus American political bias land in the same place; it's just not about that, or at least not only or mainly about that. Maybe there is a bit of correlation, but it's not that simple, not a one-to-one mapping.
It's very hard to believe that conservative bias could have led people to elect Trump to be the President, based only on having watched some of "The Apprentice," and seeing how he is as a person. But of course that happened. It's hard to relate to Trump's approval rating sticking at around 43%, based on continual revelations of corruption in government, personal failings, ethical violations, ineffective policies, botched international relations issues, pandemic denial versus pandemic resolution effort, and so on. But that happened too.
It's harder yet to place all that. How could it not relate to cognitive disconnect, a problem with seeing basic patterns of events, to use of intelligence and reasoning?
My own conclusion is that people are not using reason to the extent they think they are, ever, that our worldviews just aren't based on that. This applies to liberals too.
4. connecting these perspective issues, an absurdity, and worldview structuring
We've reached more than one absurd conclusion, beyond the pandemic issue, and rejected that conservatives are just "stupid." They are a bit gullible, maybe, prone to sticking with perspective themes well past the point of them completely failing, but that's something else. An assumption leading to this point caused that to happen.
I'm claiming here that the assumption that failed is this: that people in general are essentially rational.
For most your first reaction should be "that can't be it." For some others it would be "obviously, of course."
Other theories or explanations could also explain this outcome. One that's been drawing attention lately is that Trump following resembles conditions found in a cult, with acceptance of obviously flawed perspective a result of programming. That kind of works, that Trump supporters didn't arrive at embracing falsehoods quickly, but were led there step by step. Google-search brings up one example of this position, but it would be stated in other forms:
Trump World Is A Cult. Can Its Followers Be Saved?
It’s been over a month since Election Day, and other than surreptitiously greenlighting the transition to the Biden administration, neither Donald Trump nor his inner circle (nor many of his supporters) have publicly acknowledged the results of the vote. There are a variety of narratives that Trump World™ has perpetuated to explain the loss, including voter fraud, and followers are not only buying them, but are also spreading even more nonsensical theories online.
A relentless acceptance of blatant lies coupled with unconditional support of a leader are classic symptoms of cult-like behavior. Perhaps Sen. Bernie Sanders described it best: “The GOP has ceased to be a political party. It is now a cult.”
While some might be tempted to dismiss this rhetoric as mere hyperbole, several key aspects of cults — including a charismatic authoritarian leader and an extremist ideology — are present in Trump’s case, explains Janja Lalich, Ph.D., cult researcher, professor emerita of sociology at California State University, Chico, and author of Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults.
It's not a surprise that a professor focused on investigating cults sees Trump following as a cult, but the general point is still well worth considering. That source is also worth reviewing (although I won't summarize more of it here, the specific parallels). In a sense it's not so different than what I'm proposing, with one notable difference: it postulates that Trump supporters, and Republicans in general (which do map together, as we've seen in poll results already cited here) have broken from rational thinking, while I'm claiming that people never were as rational as it seemed.
I'm going to have a problem making my case, which should be clear already: something led to a breakdown of reasoning (tied to thinking that wearing masks during a pandemic is a bad idea), but I can't "argue back" to what that was. Maybe I'm assigning such a low status and usefulness to reason that I lose the right to argue anything based on making this assertion. If it's true, it would just be some random ideas that tend to map to reality in an interesting way, or "paint an image of it" is probably better, not a clear description of it.
Let's back up to consider where we are, how the ideas have tracked so far. I can cite research that seems to indicate that it wasn't low intelligence causing this problem (gap in perspective / false conclusion); I didn't get far, but I've already done that. It could've been cult-like conditioning, what is being asserted. Actually I kind of tentatively accept that. Conservatives / Republicans were willing to overlook Trump's personal shortcoming in order to first elect him, and it was one step to the next from there, ignoring third-party input that he wasn't ok personally, ignoring warning signs, onto finally rejecting that an in-progress pandemic was real.
Now that 3000 people are dying a day it's far less common to reject that a pandemic is happening at all, because that just doesn't work. When it was 1000, a truly horrifying long-term status, it was easier to accept that it was "just comorbitities," even though that worked as yet another example of an absurd conclusion and perspective. The CDC has long since been explaining the relative input of other conditions and causes, but this was never about exploring and accepting the best known and supported explanations.
I'm moving on to claiming that liberals also base their worldviews on predispositions and favored biases that lead to final conclusions, and don't primarily rely on reason.
The gap here is obvious: I have no alternative, no other absurd conclusion to base that on, or other type of support. Maybe I could postulate one, but it's not going to work out nearly as well as pandemic denial, or anti-mask sentiment.
Let's try an example from 2020 events: defunding the police. At a glance maybe this is ill-conceived, poorly thought-out, or maybe there is something to this. Couldn't other types of counselors and support personnel do some of the current work conducted by the police, limiting the strain on police service support, and even allowing for transfer of police funding elsewhere?
I think not. As you "dig into" this issue, per my take, it's another case of starting with a conclusion based on political bias, and never really connecting it back to any form of valid reasoning or practical outcome. The police are regarded as racially biased, in at least some cases, so this solution works to reduce the scope of their contact with the general public, which is seen as a desirable outcome. It's punitive, to some extent: reducing police function and funding ties to penalizing them for doing a bad job (as a consistent, whole group, which sort of doesn't work).
The connections people try to set up in support of this idea don't end up working, or making more sense of it. It turns out that the police aren't doing that much social-work type counseling, and in almost no cases of police response can you "swap in" a social worker. Risk of violent reaction by the parties they interact with occurs in a lot more situations than bank robberies or domestic disputes. Conducting traffic stops triggered by violations are very dangerous, for example, and you can't just separate a speeding ticket issuing function from what else might occur (apprehending a known fugitive, irrational violent response, less straightforward processing reaction to drunk driving, etc.).
They use cameras and automated systems here in Thailand to give out speeding tickets (and in Australia; I found out both in the same way), but that removes the helpful service of having police take drunk drivers off the road, since camera systems aren't flagging signs of that, yet.
Still, it doesn't work in the same way, considering this example in relation to the conservative case (and the anti-mask issue). Maybe those liberals supporting this are just swept up in considering a broad range of solutions to a perceived problem, some of which beyond "many cops are racist" could be valid, and maybe some of it could actually work. Some people advocate the direction as a thought-model more than as a likely solution.
At this point I'm going to need to move through a lot of explanation that doesn't work as well-grounded claims to flesh this out, which I'll cover in the following section.
I never did do justice to the "worldview structuring" part in the last heading, and this is so complicated and involved that it won't work to cite a poll graph or research paper to get there. This part has to rely on my own take on things, which is quite easily rejected, simply by claiming "that's not right." If I am right then sweeping it aside in such a way can't adjust the facts of the matter, regardless of whether that underlying context becomes clearly known or not, or even personally recognized by any individuals.
5. what this tells us about the nature of experienced reality (/ personal worldviews)
I'm claiming that liberal and conservative biases inform how we interpret reality. And people in general aren't as rational as they may seem (none of them; I mean a standard structure for organizing reality, not about a specific range of low-function individuals). Clear enough, right? Really that extends way beyond the US political spectrum. What Americans call liberals and conservatives, and the strands and patterns of thought they represent, do tend to map over to how people in other countries see things, but not completely directly.
Again I've touched on an issue here that would best be evaluated in a different longish article, one that I won't go further with. I can add, before leaving off, that I live in Thailand, so I am intimately familiar with another set of biases, reasoning processes, and conclusions, having lived with those day-to-day for 13 years as a part of a Thai family, Thai company, and through witnessing Thai political issues and disturbances. All for another article...
This line of thinking, that people aren't rational, really occurred to me through a completely different approach point, through the study of Buddhism and then Western philosophy. No amount of blog-post articles could do justice to either set of themes; both are broad sets of individual topics. If I were to start in by claiming that "Buddhism says..." or "according to my own study of logic..." that would be problematic. Onto the requisite resume citation anyway; that won't justify what I say as well-grounded but it does inform the context it's derived from, to a limited extent.
I did spend over a decade studying Buddhism on my own, prior to spending two educational reviews focused on that subject, as both religion and philosophy, in a BA and MA programs at Colorado State University and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I was ordained as a Thai Buddhist monk after that (only for a bit over two months), and lived in a Buddhist society for 13 years since (13 years in a month; I had only been ordained for about 6 weeks at this point 13 years ago). As topic-exposure resumes go that's decent background for claiming that "Buddhism says that...," but I could still be dead wrong, or go on to assert nonsense after that starting point.
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with my current adopted daughter, who is getting old now (13; just a kitten here) |
Anyone speaking for Western philosophy is going a bit far, regardless of background. The subject tends to splinter, so that a sub-theme expert can proudly and confidently assert their views on their own narrow range, but not the general scope. "Logic" is too broad to count as a sub-theme, if that's intended as relating to how people use reason within their approach to reality. I've taken a few logic classes (three, I guess, not counting a fourth studying how binary logic and design works out in an engineering course, in an earlier Industrial Engineering degree pursuit). It's not enough to say I understand how human reasoning works, and what its limits are; no one can make that claim. It would be nice if they could, if that just suddenly became clear.
Within the actual practice of Buddhism--which is a completely different thing than the academic study of it, oddly, or the religious practice, as I see it--you do examine the nature of your own reality. That's assuming that Buddhism is even about that, that it's a set of tools and practices for use to examine and clarify your own reality, removing specific forms of errors claimed to exist.
The funny part about explaining Buddhism is that it's really that set of tools, more than it is a description of the conclusions. Meditation and mindfulness practices, guidance on a functional approach to personal ethics; these aren't explanations for how reality is. Parts of the "wisdom" section are that, teachings about what is likely to drop out along the way, as incorrect assumptions likely to require revision and simplification.
But these would take on different forms in different people. Not all worldviews and perspectives would contain the exact same errors. The ones not related to your own case aren't particularly helpful or relevant, in terms of applying Buddhist practices to resolving problems with your own perspective.
Buddhism isn't necessarily a completely rational process either. It's not a logical puzzle to sort out. People aren't said to be completely reason-based. Reasoning is definitely one facet of human experience, one part of what a worldview is, but probably not even the main part, if there was such an underlying singular foundation or most-important cornerstone. You don't resolve problems of reasoning using reason itself. How does it work then? We're right back to that being too long a story to do justice to here. An example can help, but that's about it.
A very simple, perhaps overly simple, case can help, one that I recently cited for a friend in discussing this subject. Let's take the case of "road rage." In a more moderate and universal form that's just anxiety or dissatisfaction related to spending time in traffic. No one really likes that. My son always hated that as a small baby, crying loudly when the car slowed or stopped, which was curious; if he was too young to cognitively put it all together (as he was), why was he so upset about wasting his time? I don't know.
The anxiety isn't rational. It's not that the hundreds of other people and cars clogging the road system are conspiring against you, it's only that there's a problem (eg. a car accident), or as likely the road system just wasn't designed to support the current traffic volume. It's not easy to "just relax" and accept the circumstances. But at the same time there is no value or benefit in experiencing a high level of anxiety. It certainly doesn't make traffic move faster. It should be possible to understand this very familiar context and resolve the problem, to just accept reality as it is, right then, and related to accepting this delay as a routine part of daily life (to the extent that someone can't just move, or quit their job).
It's just an example. In fact it is possible to come to terms with this source of anxiety, even to fully resolve it, but it's not simple or straightforward. Reason alone won't do it. Acceptance of the experienced conditions of reality on a "deeper" level is required. This spatial model only goes so far (the "deeper" part), to be clear. To some limited extent a rational experience of reality is "resting on" a foundation of underlying assumptions and levels of experience, but not in the same way that a house sits on a physical foundation. They are simply different scopes of experience, with a bit more complex a causal relationship than that implies.
How would one "deal directly" with this traffic anxiety? In the Western paradigm seeing a therapist, talking it through, being guided to examine feelings and assumptions, in order to eventually resolve an unconscious internal contradiction, an intolerance for undesired delays.
Let's jump way ahead. Could a conservative Trump supporter use this approach to resolve their anti-mask sentiment, to seek psychological counseling, examining underlying assumptions leading to this false and problematic conclusion? That's exactly what that conservative cult topic professor was suggesting, only stopping at "maybe."
Could liberals examine their biases and framing issues related to police racism, and police duty scope, in order to resolve coming to a problematic and false conclusion that cutting budgets would be a rational, effective solution? Sure, why not.
The problem is that in neither case would the conservatives and liberals in question really dig down to that level of assumptions. They would get stuck at the "higher" level of debate; do masks really work?, how do I interpret evidence and sources of authority?, what are the problems with the information sources I've been drawing on?, is dislike of liberal themes leading to accepting any opposite position or conclusion?, etc.
It works on the liberal side too. Again, a running theme in these ideas, it's problematic in seeing the underlying pattern that in many of these cases liberals are currently "more right." Obviously masks help reduce pandemic risk. Obviously Trump, the person who was a bit unhinged as a reality television star, who led businesses to numerous failures, and fairly obviously and purposefully evaded tax liability (do we even need to add "allegedly" at this point?), wasn't making that much better decisions as a leader of the country.
The reason that I know that reality isn't rationally based is because I've examined my own personal experience of reality.
That's going to sound like a stronger claim than I intend to make, but it is what it is.
I've already demonstrated that conservative bias has led to absurd conclusions. It's possible that a cult-like form of programming was a main root cause of that, but I'm offering that it was only possible because reason doesn't play the role we typically think it does in constructing a worldview or perspective. Glancing at an example of a liberal position following a similar pattern (the defunding the police theme) would be unconvincing, because it wasn't absurd to the same degree, or in the same way.
Digging into liberal gender definition themes, or universal basic income acceptance (why don't we all just not work if we don't feel like it, and live off free money handed out by the government?) could go further.
But really reason can never clearly define the limits of reason.
Buddhism gives us other tools to use. Western philosophy approaches a really, really broad scope of problems and themes from a lot of different perspectives, but a lot of that relates to making false starts, or heading off on relatively irrelevant tangents. Analytic Western philosophy (the branch I was a part of, more or less) tends to use reason being functional, valid, and comprehensive in scope of application as a starting-point assumption, precisely the range I'm questioning. If you do question that premise you are no longer "doing philosophy," at least not within the scope of that agreed-upon approach. The Continental branch might be more accepting, but then the terminology used and range of individual approaches is completely different.
I think it works and is helpful just to note that "something went wrong" related to a lot of conservative political themed perspective and conclusions. I've not put together the last piece of the puzzle here, how deconstructing my own worldview assures me that it's a common problem in worldview building and perspective instead.
Covering that is another 2000 word article task, and it may or may not be one that I ever get around to writing. It may prove impossible to write it. There was no singular, "aha!" revelation that informed me of that. I read hundreds of books, and continually examined my own worldview and immediate experiences over a period of two decades (or roughly three now, given that the process never really ends, but that first 20 years of exploration was more informative). I'm reasonable enough, but not completely rational, as I see it. Reason only goes so far as a basis for what I do, and how I see things.
6. examples of non-rational worldview basis
That was already a decent place to leave it, but this stands out as a gap, doesn't it? I never would be able to justify why people don't structure their personal reality in a rational way, but I can pass on examples. Let's extend two examples already passed on, the one about driving and the pandemic theme.
Of course "road rage" is a better example of an emotional reaction, but that doesn't justify that our relation to driving experience and moment to moment planning and expectations changes aren't rational. I think I can cite and example of how this works though, not serving as solid evidence, but some indication.
If we start out driving in the morning and run into heavy traffic we automatically shift the tone for that day, into a "running late" mode. We would naturally expect that other delays will occur, or else at least feel apprehension about this. To some extent--I'm claiming, at least--our normal expectations tie to emotional tone, and shifting frame of reference tied to analytic interpretation as it overlaps with emotional response. We expect it to be a "running late" sort of day.
In part that's already a given; time was lost. In part it's rational to expect that heavy traffic in one place could relate to heavy traffic elsewhere; the cars are going somewhere, some where we are going. But then this can also shift expectations, beyond what rationally links. Emotions work as both an internal reward system and to establish tone, framework for dealing with experienced contexts, and the second part goes beyond rational analysis. This "off day" theme can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's not completely separate, but rejecting mask use, or that the pandemic is a serious thing, also ties to experience setting the tone and context for further experience. If we know someone in our family who was sick with corona virus, or a contact has died, that changes perspective more than any number of external stats. It's just how people relate to ideas and experiences, normally. This isn't a rational context, because sampling is very uneven, and not a good indicator for likely future experience.
Then ties to information sources also comes into play. In the US right now there is a divide in media sources that maps to political affiliation, and liberals and conservatives get different news. Someone active online would experience much different exposure than someone drawing information from television and print news, regardless of which side they fall on. Rational versus emotional information processing, or other variants, all need to stem from a basic supply of starting point information.
Really what I'm claiming is more severe than that, but it hasn't been fleshed out here. I see it as an illusion that we really are basing our worldview on the type of construct I've just implied (better or worse information sources + logical or rational processing, with bias as a potential disruptive factor). We "go with our gut," in relation to decisions, and our life-paths and immediate experiences follow patterns derived from the experiences of others.
To fill in how that works one needs to understand what national culture and sub-cultures are contributing, which is no small task. All of that is generally not fully observable, until there is a very significant problem that brings it to light. It's a bit like a fish not fully noticing that it lives in the water, or us being less aware of air as our life-context medium until something unusual comes up (eg. taking an elevator and noticing the pressure differential across a height change). Moving abroad brings up what that context was contributing, but even that process takes a long time. It took me about three years for Thai culture context (perspective) to become normal to me, and it really starting feeling familiar only after about a decade.
There is a commonly experienced illusion that we are constructing the analytic interpretation of reality moment to moment, that the ideas all add up to a rational construction and control of the activities of our lives, the cause and effect streams, broad decisions and moment to moment choices. Per my current understanding human experience is not like that.
The pandemic risk and traffic examples definitely don't add up to a conclusive counter to this general expectation. Buddhism gives us tools to spot how we do construct our reality piece by piece though, using meditation to calm the mind, and flag forms of noise, and mindfulness practices to notice the components as they occur.
Typical errors in worldview building or analytical structuring occur in decision analysis, but this has too many tangents in it already, to go into that. It comes to mind because my wife tends to try to make decisions based on outcomes, not expected outcomes, leaving no room for external variability. It's funny seeing that play out again and again.
It's just one of countless forms of typical irrational experience (or really non-rational experience). In the end we build up reality out of assumptions, habits, and vaguely defined goals, and then try to justify it all as reasoned out, when really it's not. It's probably better that way, since intuition and gut-feel somehow give us more input to work with, and we often do better basing most decisions on hunches instead of reason. The more removed a topic is from human experience (eg. related to computer systems development, or I guess to some extent even to pandemic risk) then the more helpful reason would probably be, because those hunches are going to be based on pattern-recognition not based on much of value.
7. the positive side
So far a natural read of all this might be quite negative, relating to it framing people as a lot more limited than we typically tend to see them. But not necessarily.
If people are relatively rational, let's say motivated and self-determined by an even, 50-50 balance of rational and other inputs and internal processes, then they are largely responsible for all the problems, personal gaps, and evils in the world. And for how they themselves are, really. But if people inherit assumptions, patterns, biases, meaning frameworks, self-identification themes, and so on, and typically never consciously examine these then they are more "off the hook" related to being a primary cause of their own self-nature.
Really I mean to head in that same direction without the emphasis on praise or blame, which that last statement just invoked. On that positive "praise" side, it also takes away credit for people being self-determined at the same time, to accept that luck and a broad range sub-conscious inputs make up who we are, and the ideas we accept and work with.
