Am I the only one to 'feel' that essay ended on a bit of a condescending note. It 'felt' like my Opinion of current and recent events is shaped by my personal work experience so they are more valuable than your 'Opinions' probably developed by 'feelings' however much analysis and logical thinking you may have applied to them. Bluntly, I'm more likely to be right.
It reminds me of Naked Capitalism, which I know you value highly, where Yves adopts exactly the same tone, which tends to spoil an otherwise excellent blog.
No you are not alone James. The essay is interesting to read, as usual. The position Aurélien takes reminds me the one of a « manager » ( - a member of the ruling class that Aurélien criticizes often -) not capable to accept the fact that a rational argumentation, any topic, must take into account the fact that non rational things happen when humans are involved. This simple reality shapes our lives.
A person was « not exactly doing what was expected » from the manager who had dozens of logical arguments to do this, now, and how. What most irritated the manager is that the person could not see by himself all the reasons and go forward by accepting at least one of them.
The person simply did not feel like working on that day …
Likewise. NC went to the dogs when Covid came along (I had my doubts about it prior to that as well). So much "astute, scientific reasoning by people purporting to be experts;" all of it dead wrong.
Great piece. But you can't separate 'feelings' from thought. It is my feelings that made me think about events. In the end I came to the conclusion that most of what my country does is based on the 'feelings' of a small group of people in MI6. And they are, mainly, wrong.
"The simple answer, according to psychologists, is that our opinions generally have emotional rather than intellectual roots, and indeed rationality largely functions as a post hoc justification. Our political opinions, ultimately, are what we feel about the world, not what we think about it. And in turn, our opinions about particular events have a lot to do with how we feel about the world in general. It’s not an exaggeration to say that most people’s views about the kind of things that happen today are extensions of concerns of their own ego. And consequently, invitations to change their minds because new facts emerge, or because old ideas are discredited by new evidence, are in fact a threat to the strength and even survival of that ego."
At risk of repeating myself....For most humans most of the time, the fastest and surest way to wind up dead or seriously disadvantaged has been at the hands of our fellow humans. At the same time, "our group", whether by faith, family, tribe, regiment, whatever, are the people we can trust to have our back.
Therefore, whatever else happens, whatever we have to do, believe absurdities, blindly follow barking insane leaders, parrot obvious lies to our detriment, do or suffer terrible things, but please whatever you do, please don't kick us out of the group!
What this also means is that when we are presented with incontrovertible proof that the group narrative is wrong or that the group leaders are mad or charlatans or worse, rather than change leaders or change beliefs or change groups, most people, most of the time will instead double down. Witness the behavior of cultists.
The process is called "cognitive dissonance" and it is abundantly documented. As alluded to earlier, there are entire religions organized around the principle.
Cognitive dissonance is not limited to stupid people. In fact, the intelligent are at least as prone, perhaps because they are better at rationalizing. In fact, much so-called "knowledge work" is basically learning symbol manipulation in order to rationalize something.
"Cognitive dissonance", yeah - but check out the "identity threat" literature, it is so fun!
One chunk of "identity threat" research I found particularly enlightening:
People with moderately-extremist views, who are completely resistant to evidence and rational arguments, can be swayed towards a less-extreme position by being presented with a radically-extremist version of their own views.
Counterintuitive, right? Yet true.
The mechanism is "identity threat": people get a feeling that their precious in-group is edging towards a qualitatively different (and dangerous) identity; so they adjust their views away from it.
The trick is to carefully design the above "radical-extemist position" in such a way that it is perceived as coming from WITHIN the current in-group, yet is so fringe as to make the person uncomfortable. In this case, it doesn't trigger the habitual "rejection-of-outgroup" response - instead, the person intuitively protects their in-group core identity by moderating their position.
Needless to say, this trick doesn't work with raving-mad, "长iII-them-all" kinds of extremists.
" It’s not an exaggeration to say that most people’s views about the kind of things that happen today are extensions of concerns of their own ego."
To say this is to make the same mistake as unemotional 'scientific' materialism, but in the opposite direction. It may be an alien concept to you, but many (ok, some) people try to make ethical choices. In many cases they make the wrong choice, but this is more to do with (deliberately) distorted informational input than deliberate deviation.
I like the football analogy - reminds me of being dragged off by my Dad & 3 great uncles in the 70's, who all had a huge commitment to a certain 4th division club. " Bloody Ref ", " That was offside ", " Foul !!! " etc. I often didn't see it that way but thought it diplomatic not to say so.
As others have noted, your final paragraph suggests that only ‘experts’ are entitled to opinions. I see a number of problems with that:
- Experts are subject to conflicts of interest like everyone else. Expertise is easily purchased by powerful economic or political interests.
- Experts can be just as dogmatic, egotistical and petty as the rest of us. Witness bitter academic disputes between opposing schools of interpretation.
- No amount of expertise allows for accurate predictions or even perfect understanding of the recent past.
- Decisionmaking by experts (which is a necessary corollary if only experts are allowed to have opinions) is fundamentally authoritarian and undemocratic.
I think that with the deracinating of society, the atomization of the people in them, and the internet wonderful ability to let people with the most outrageous beliefs find whole groups just like them, the ability to create the solid emotional and intellectual foundation is lost for many people. If you don’t have an understanding of yourself, which is a reference point a person uses when figuring out the world, nor do you have any people that you connect with and trust in real life, which is how you can reference your own actions and beliefs, how can you be reasonable? Then add the many governments, corporations, and organizations that have whole departments of experts on how to manipulate people emotions and thinking. I am almost surprised that anyone can think clearly at all.
While it's true that the demand for sufficient emotional sustenance is great, what seems to me to be changing with today's profusion of instant media is precisely the use of these emotions for political ends. In fact, the actions of democracies are often constrained by public opinion. The unbridled development of propaganda in democracies (the last straw!) enables leaders to exacerbate these emotions to justify their objectives and decisions. This is how we see the "binairization" of Western societies. Everything becomes black or white... no subject is gray. Thank you Aurélien for this wonderful post.
Yves, the woman who runs Naked Capitalism has a deep understanding of finance and financial chicanery. She is less sure-footed when it comes to international affairs and the military. She is a very well educated woman of about 80 (my age) who is unmarried with no children and she has recently moved to Thailand. Like many self-exiles she has become a bit un-moored from her homeland. I wish her well but I've become more cautious about her judgements and her tendency to conflate legitimate disagreement with what she calls "Making Shit Up". But NC still calls attention to sources I'd otherwise miss. She to some degree has become an example of Aurelien's emotionalism-not-thinking, which is too bad.
Yeah. In my opinion she has become un-moored from reality. She expressed to me psycho-jargon the fact that she has "a strong desire for domination". These sorts of people are best left to play their own games with themselves.
But what about this. From psychology we know that “feelings” do have some roots in reality. It’s just we didn’t consciously process it.
Without disputing the main points of the article, I’d wonder - are the feelings of people that irrelevant? For example, I know people on both sides of Ukrainian conflict, who committed something, even their life, not based on deep knowledge of history, geography or what not, but on “the feelings of duty”, with no further questions asked or research done.
Stalin did have a green thumb and grew orange trees (or where they lemon trees?) and Hitler was vegetarian and loved animals. And likely both killed people, personally. Hitler in war, and Stalin in his underground activities (the famous bank robbery in early 1900s to get funding for the party).
Nevertheless, what we read here is not far from what Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce, baron de Lahontan describes in his conversations with Kondiaronk (Adario in the book): http://www.professorcampbell.org/sources/kondiaronk.html
I always look to David Graeber and David Wentworth's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity as the best cure against the Boss, the big dictator/hero that can come and solve all the issues. The only dictator that I kind of like, as presented by Colleen McCullough is Julius Caesar and I don't think he ever got that function. The other one, fictional one, is Emperor Leto II of DUne Arrakis, the Emperor-God that lived of thousands of years and could see in the future and became a sand-worm...
As for the very emotional apes we are, I am always amazed especially about British press on how the very carefully choose emotion laded words to describe this or that. The Economist is great at it. RT is devoid of much emotions when presenting news or even opinion pieces. Anglo-American MSM is just chock full of emotions as the 9/10th of the iceberg. The English started early, during the Civil War, with the Parliament side really publishing yellow articles about the King.
This is why Gorgias was right: Know thyself is an imperative...
He seeked glory on the battlefield, the only way to aquire funds and power to run Rome. He was bad for his enemies indeed, but I wouldn't call him psychopatic. He was deified by Romans, lower classes, because he did right by them.
Even wanted to put a cap on the interest charged to territories under Roman control...
Few are counting the bodies caused by the entrenchment or defense of a system run by oligarchy, in war or by its effects... It is all about these bloody autocrats!
We live in an age of ultra-nationalism, so the patriotism we feel can be affected by the level of commitment to "our" nation, and that runs the gamut from weak to strong, correctly influenced by emotion rather than reason. I myself have not been patriotic about the government of the USA since the Kennedy assassination, so I constantly look for evidence of its weaknesses and brutality (there is much, as you well know).
However, my feelings for my fellow citizens is strong and is the bedrock of my "patriotic" feeling- it is for them, not the government. It is , for me, a short stretch to understand how people from other countries probably feel about their closest citizen-friends, and their need for security and a level of prosperity. The real defeat of any global cause is the misplaced patriotism to the government and not to fellow citizens, which is a difficult hurdle in this most nationalistic world. Is it only an emotional response that I wish people to survive the stupidity of their governments?
So, all the discussion of borders, fights for resources, identity, sovereignty, ad nauseam, adds to this deep crisis of global dependence we all have versus national independence mythology we all believe, and how nations cannot confront this issue. There are many reasons for that, mostly corporate advantage in separate nations vying for a deal, but the goal of resolution without eliminating national borders scares the hell out of 98% of people.
Am I the only one to 'feel' that essay ended on a bit of a condescending note. It 'felt' like my Opinion of current and recent events is shaped by my personal work experience so they are more valuable than your 'Opinions' probably developed by 'feelings' however much analysis and logical thinking you may have applied to them. Bluntly, I'm more likely to be right.
It reminds me of Naked Capitalism, which I know you value highly, where Yves adopts exactly the same tone, which tends to spoil an otherwise excellent blog.
Sorry for the criticism , I do value your essays.
No you are not alone James. The essay is interesting to read, as usual. The position Aurélien takes reminds me the one of a « manager » ( - a member of the ruling class that Aurélien criticizes often -) not capable to accept the fact that a rational argumentation, any topic, must take into account the fact that non rational things happen when humans are involved. This simple reality shapes our lives.
A person was « not exactly doing what was expected » from the manager who had dozens of logical arguments to do this, now, and how. What most irritated the manager is that the person could not see by himself all the reasons and go forward by accepting at least one of them.
The person simply did not feel like working on that day …
regards, Philippe Lerch
+1 re both this essay and NC
Likewise. NC went to the dogs when Covid came along (I had my doubts about it prior to that as well). So much "astute, scientific reasoning by people purporting to be experts;" all of it dead wrong.
On the contrary it was one of the few useful places where technical evaluation of the nature and consequences of the virus was to be found.
Awa an bile yer heid!
Yes, that is 'being English'. Perfidious Albion.
If you don't like doing it, maybe just stop doing it?
Great piece. But you can't separate 'feelings' from thought. It is my feelings that made me think about events. In the end I came to the conclusion that most of what my country does is based on the 'feelings' of a small group of people in MI6. And they are, mainly, wrong.
Kids thought the ages have from time to time been "disrespectful and lacking hospitality for their parents". It goes back, traceably to ancient Egypt.
"The simple answer, according to psychologists, is that our opinions generally have emotional rather than intellectual roots, and indeed rationality largely functions as a post hoc justification. Our political opinions, ultimately, are what we feel about the world, not what we think about it. And in turn, our opinions about particular events have a lot to do with how we feel about the world in general. It’s not an exaggeration to say that most people’s views about the kind of things that happen today are extensions of concerns of their own ego. And consequently, invitations to change their minds because new facts emerge, or because old ideas are discredited by new evidence, are in fact a threat to the strength and even survival of that ego."
At risk of repeating myself....For most humans most of the time, the fastest and surest way to wind up dead or seriously disadvantaged has been at the hands of our fellow humans. At the same time, "our group", whether by faith, family, tribe, regiment, whatever, are the people we can trust to have our back.
Therefore, whatever else happens, whatever we have to do, believe absurdities, blindly follow barking insane leaders, parrot obvious lies to our detriment, do or suffer terrible things, but please whatever you do, please don't kick us out of the group!
What this also means is that when we are presented with incontrovertible proof that the group narrative is wrong or that the group leaders are mad or charlatans or worse, rather than change leaders or change beliefs or change groups, most people, most of the time will instead double down. Witness the behavior of cultists.
The process is called "cognitive dissonance" and it is abundantly documented. As alluded to earlier, there are entire religions organized around the principle.
Cognitive dissonance is not limited to stupid people. In fact, the intelligent are at least as prone, perhaps because they are better at rationalizing. In fact, much so-called "knowledge work" is basically learning symbol manipulation in order to rationalize something.
"Cognitive dissonance", yeah - but check out the "identity threat" literature, it is so fun!
One chunk of "identity threat" research I found particularly enlightening:
People with moderately-extremist views, who are completely resistant to evidence and rational arguments, can be swayed towards a less-extreme position by being presented with a radically-extremist version of their own views.
Counterintuitive, right? Yet true.
The mechanism is "identity threat": people get a feeling that their precious in-group is edging towards a qualitatively different (and dangerous) identity; so they adjust their views away from it.
The trick is to carefully design the above "radical-extemist position" in such a way that it is perceived as coming from WITHIN the current in-group, yet is so fringe as to make the person uncomfortable. In this case, it doesn't trigger the habitual "rejection-of-outgroup" response - instead, the person intuitively protects their in-group core identity by moderating their position.
Needless to say, this trick doesn't work with raving-mad, "长iII-them-all" kinds of extremists.
" It’s not an exaggeration to say that most people’s views about the kind of things that happen today are extensions of concerns of their own ego."
To say this is to make the same mistake as unemotional 'scientific' materialism, but in the opposite direction. It may be an alien concept to you, but many (ok, some) people try to make ethical choices. In many cases they make the wrong choice, but this is more to do with (deliberately) distorted informational input than deliberate deviation.
The populace, maybe, but rulers who make choices based on ethics are quickly replaced by the more ruthless.
I like the football analogy - reminds me of being dragged off by my Dad & 3 great uncles in the 70's, who all had a huge commitment to a certain 4th division club. " Bloody Ref ", " That was offside ", " Foul !!! " etc. I often didn't see it that way but thought it diplomatic not to say so.
As others have noted, your final paragraph suggests that only ‘experts’ are entitled to opinions. I see a number of problems with that:
- Experts are subject to conflicts of interest like everyone else. Expertise is easily purchased by powerful economic or political interests.
- Experts can be just as dogmatic, egotistical and petty as the rest of us. Witness bitter academic disputes between opposing schools of interpretation.
- No amount of expertise allows for accurate predictions or even perfect understanding of the recent past.
- Decisionmaking by experts (which is a necessary corollary if only experts are allowed to have opinions) is fundamentally authoritarian and undemocratic.
You really should add footnotes and bibliography: as is you hint at a lot of literature and research which would equally fascinating to explore!
I think that with the deracinating of society, the atomization of the people in them, and the internet wonderful ability to let people with the most outrageous beliefs find whole groups just like them, the ability to create the solid emotional and intellectual foundation is lost for many people. If you don’t have an understanding of yourself, which is a reference point a person uses when figuring out the world, nor do you have any people that you connect with and trust in real life, which is how you can reference your own actions and beliefs, how can you be reasonable? Then add the many governments, corporations, and organizations that have whole departments of experts on how to manipulate people emotions and thinking. I am almost surprised that anyone can think clearly at all.
Very nice to read and full of information that was nice to get. But what was it all about?
That we get our opinions from our instincts? And then refuse to change them because we are invested in them?
While it's true that the demand for sufficient emotional sustenance is great, what seems to me to be changing with today's profusion of instant media is precisely the use of these emotions for political ends. In fact, the actions of democracies are often constrained by public opinion. The unbridled development of propaganda in democracies (the last straw!) enables leaders to exacerbate these emotions to justify their objectives and decisions. This is how we see the "binairization" of Western societies. Everything becomes black or white... no subject is gray. Thank you Aurélien for this wonderful post.
Yves, the woman who runs Naked Capitalism has a deep understanding of finance and financial chicanery. She is less sure-footed when it comes to international affairs and the military. She is a very well educated woman of about 80 (my age) who is unmarried with no children and she has recently moved to Thailand. Like many self-exiles she has become a bit un-moored from her homeland. I wish her well but I've become more cautious about her judgements and her tendency to conflate legitimate disagreement with what she calls "Making Shit Up". But NC still calls attention to sources I'd otherwise miss. She to some degree has become an example of Aurelien's emotionalism-not-thinking, which is too bad.
Yeah. In my opinion she has become un-moored from reality. She expressed to me psycho-jargon the fact that she has "a strong desire for domination". These sorts of people are best left to play their own games with themselves.
But what about this. From psychology we know that “feelings” do have some roots in reality. It’s just we didn’t consciously process it.
Without disputing the main points of the article, I’d wonder - are the feelings of people that irrelevant? For example, I know people on both sides of Ukrainian conflict, who committed something, even their life, not based on deep knowledge of history, geography or what not, but on “the feelings of duty”, with no further questions asked or research done.
That was a breath of fresh air.
Stalin did have a green thumb and grew orange trees (or where they lemon trees?) and Hitler was vegetarian and loved animals. And likely both killed people, personally. Hitler in war, and Stalin in his underground activities (the famous bank robbery in early 1900s to get funding for the party).
Nevertheless, what we read here is not far from what Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce, baron de Lahontan describes in his conversations with Kondiaronk (Adario in the book): http://www.professorcampbell.org/sources/kondiaronk.html
I always look to David Graeber and David Wentworth's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity as the best cure against the Boss, the big dictator/hero that can come and solve all the issues. The only dictator that I kind of like, as presented by Colleen McCullough is Julius Caesar and I don't think he ever got that function. The other one, fictional one, is Emperor Leto II of DUne Arrakis, the Emperor-God that lived of thousands of years and could see in the future and became a sand-worm...
As for the very emotional apes we are, I am always amazed especially about British press on how the very carefully choose emotion laded words to describe this or that. The Economist is great at it. RT is devoid of much emotions when presenting news or even opinion pieces. Anglo-American MSM is just chock full of emotions as the 9/10th of the iceberg. The English started early, during the Civil War, with the Parliament side really publishing yellow articles about the King.
This is why Gorgias was right: Know thyself is an imperative...
Unfortunately, Julius Caesar turns out to be just another psychopathic war criminal, if you read his memoirs.
He seeked glory on the battlefield, the only way to aquire funds and power to run Rome. He was bad for his enemies indeed, but I wouldn't call him psychopatic. He was deified by Romans, lower classes, because he did right by them.
Even wanted to put a cap on the interest charged to territories under Roman control...
OK, don't count the bodies. It's a western habit.
Few are counting the bodies caused by the entrenchment or defense of a system run by oligarchy, in war or by its effects... It is all about these bloody autocrats!
We live in an age of ultra-nationalism, so the patriotism we feel can be affected by the level of commitment to "our" nation, and that runs the gamut from weak to strong, correctly influenced by emotion rather than reason. I myself have not been patriotic about the government of the USA since the Kennedy assassination, so I constantly look for evidence of its weaknesses and brutality (there is much, as you well know).
However, my feelings for my fellow citizens is strong and is the bedrock of my "patriotic" feeling- it is for them, not the government. It is , for me, a short stretch to understand how people from other countries probably feel about their closest citizen-friends, and their need for security and a level of prosperity. The real defeat of any global cause is the misplaced patriotism to the government and not to fellow citizens, which is a difficult hurdle in this most nationalistic world. Is it only an emotional response that I wish people to survive the stupidity of their governments?
So, all the discussion of borders, fights for resources, identity, sovereignty, ad nauseam, adds to this deep crisis of global dependence we all have versus national independence mythology we all believe, and how nations cannot confront this issue. There are many reasons for that, mostly corporate advantage in separate nations vying for a deal, but the goal of resolution without eliminating national borders scares the hell out of 98% of people.
"I made myself mildly unpopular by asking if I could have some."
Ha!! :P
" . . . in the days when there were student grants." Savage.
As always, a very astute commentary. Emotional beliefs and decisions seem to be at the heart of almost every war and rivalry.