Different Destructive Movements Emerge From The Same Cognitive Disability
Dysrational Movements Are The Adult Face Of Emotional Immaturity
Contents
The anti-rational (i.e., dysrational) movements
Marxism, Nazism, and “wokeism” are dysrational1An irrational person is not thinking rationally, but they can. A dysrational person is pathologically unable to think rationally. movements. Each shares a common and fundamental cause for their dysrationality: strong emotions that rise to undermine participants’ free will. Without ‘free will,’ adherents are explicitly unintellectual. Are these individuals smart (i.e., knowledgeable)? Sometimes. Logical? Usually. But are they rational? No. They cannot understand or value the new and differing views of others. Accordingly, these movements are a severe threat to a cooperative and harmonious civilization. Marxist, Nazi, and woke adherents are thus always the oppressing actors in their societal interactions with others. Rational (intellectual) people, by contrast, do not oppress. Yet, paradoxically, dysrational people are cognitively oppressed, just as they claim. Their oppression, however, is a handicap of their mind’s own making. It is not a learned or acquired behavior. Instead, it is a behavior that has not been properly unlearned. This is why the “dysrational-movement” problem has reoccuringly emerged, to a lesser or greater extent, over the centuries. It is the default condition of youth. When it is permitted to exist unchecked, destructive conflict will follow.
Dysrational people believe that what they KNOW is irrefutably correct. In addition, each must identify a cognitive enemy who is, ostensibly, the face of their social-conceptual misfortune and oppression, a misfortune that they, in actual truth, endure only because of their rigid mind. To these dysrational individuals, the oppressor-enemy maintains patently false and intolerable views. Unable to reason, the oppressed individual reflexively labels conflicting views as “lies.” Worse, the opposing oppressor-enemy may also have the capacity to think for themselves. This reasoning flexibility further disorients and unbalances the dysrational individual in their interactions with them. The opposing oppressor-enemy thus emerges as a profound cognitive threat to the oppressed person.
Dysrational groups can sometimes come together in opposition to their oppression. Cognitive oppression does, after all, arise from the same cause: dysrationality. The individual beliefs dysrationally held, however, will vary:
For the Nazis, the oppressor-enemy was the Jews, and for the Marxists, it was the bourgeoisie. In America today, the constructed enemy is the “White Christian Nationalist” or White “Supremacist.” As Marx declared in his communist manifesto, “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another …” True. These two groups, dysrational and NOT dysrational, the true parties to the underlying conflict, have existed in constant opposition to one another ever since the emergence of modern humans. Moreover, without reason, the discovery of objective truth is an impossible ask for oppressed individuals. Thus, they will remain tragically oppressed because, in all likelihood, it is how their brains work. It has little or nothing to do with the “oppressor.” These oppressed individuals are in a SELF-imposed cognitive prison of the known. And, because of the overpowering control of their emotions and habits, they will grow more ensconced in that prison every day.
White Supremacy is a relevant and appropriate example of the problem. Here, it is not that cognitively empowered Americans feel superior to oppressed persons; it is that the oppressed persons feel inferior to the “oppressors.” There is little doubt that this feeling is incapacitating. Yet, almost certainly, the source of this disability is the oppressed person’s emotional immaturity; their known truths or beliefs are firmly trapped by their emotions. And likely, the oppressor-enemy does not similarly suffer from the same affliction. Still unable to reconcile conflicting views, the oppressor-enemy’s opposition beliefs necessarily provoke a defensive fight-or-flight response in the oppressed person. The oppressed person’s SELF cannot be wrong; its cognitive well-being is at stake. Critically, the cognitively immature (oppressed) person cannot contemplate two truths at the same time, this being the purpose of reason. The inescapable defensive reaction thus poses a danger to all parties involved and is precisely how terrible human conflict comes to pass.
The oppressed person operates with what should be understood as tribal thinking–the predominant evolutionary cognitive model before homo sapiens were capable of producing civilization through objective thinking. Unfortunately, humans are not far removed from this past and inferior approach to thinking. Yet, at this particular time in human evolution, humans simultaneously sit astride both thinking approaches–tribal and rational. Yet, for tribal thinkers, any belief system outside the tribe’s worldview threatens the tribe’s cohesion and proper function and thus provokes a reaction. From the tribe’s point of view, threatening views, even truthful ones, must be purged or eliminated, with violence if necessary. For emotionally mature readers, however, this counterproductive reaction feels inconceivable. Yet, this oppressive response isn’t speculation. It has happened many times before …
… followed by, inescapably, the intellectual purges of alternative or informed thinking
Anti-intellectualism
For the dysrational person, conflicting views stand in “constant opposition” to one another (see again, Marx). This unsettled state is thus both an unbearable and a cognitive anathema to the emotionally immature individual because, without access to reason, there is no capacity to resolve the ideological conflict objectively. Therefore, dysrational people, should they acquire political control, seek to eliminate the cognitive opposition entirely, by force if necessary:
In the 20th century, societies systematically removed intellectuals from power, to expediently end public political dissent. During the Cold War (1945–1991), the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (1948–1990) ostracized the philosopher Václav Havel as a politically unreliable man unworthy of ordinary Czechs’ trust; the post-communist Velvet Revolution (17 November – 29 December 1989) elected Havel president for ten years.[5] Ideologically-extreme dictatorships who mean to recreate a society such as the Khmer Rouge rule of Cambodia (1975–1979) pre-emptively killed potential political opponents, especially the educated middle-class and the intelligentsia. To realize the Year Zero of Cambodian history, Khmer Rouge social engineering restructured the economy by de-industrialization and assassinated non-communist Cambodians suspected of “involvement in free-market activities” such as the urban professionals of society (physicians, attorneys, engineers, et al.) and people with political connections to foreign governments. The doctrine of Pol Pot identified the farmers as the true proletariat of Cambodia and the true representatives of the working class entitled to hold government power, hence the anti-intellectual purges.
Anti-intellectualism – Wikipedia
Anti-intellectualism is dysrationality and Dysrationality is emotional immaturity. Emotional immaturity is a lack of SELF-control (Free Will).
The neurological cause of an oppressed mind
Emotional immaturity (no Free Will)
Emotions are a facilitating element of your older (from an evolutionary perspective) brain. Driven by the amygdala, they are central to subconscious thinking. Emotions are the feedback, control, and preservation system for what you already know. Without them, a nefarious person could trivially reprogram the human brain. Doubt it? It happens today. Groups, governments, and other people routinely offer all manner of bad and directed behavior/thoughts towards emotionally immature individuals just by authoritatively declaring “a truth” to them. This is the real danger of social media. Likes and follows program the receptive or vulnerable mind. All that is required is trust, fear, shame, reward, or other factor that might motivate or distort the SELF’s decision-making. Think of COVID-19 or ‘climate change’ as an illustration of fear manipulation. Yet, once beliefs are embedded in the mind, without an individual’s SELF-control and reason, they are nearly impossible to undo. Only reality has an effective counterprogramming say. But reality will not succeed with a nudge. A “new direction” feedback shove is usually required.
The problem is that emotion circumvents SELF-control; SELF-control is free will and the gateway to reason. Without reason, there is often little hope of promptly changing the mind of a person previously programmed. Reality’s feedback is like the wind. When it happens, it takes time. Because of emotions, cognitive habits are tenacious and difficult things to shake; this is by evolutionary design
Unfortunately, a programmed mind is capable of nearly any act. Here’s what Hitler, an anti-intellectual of the first order, stated:
What should men appeal to for guidance once the intellect has been rejected? “We must distrust the intelligence and the conscience,” states Hitler, “and must place our trust in our instincts.” “Trust your instincts, your feelings, or whatever you like to call them,” says Hitler.
Peikoff, Leonard. The Cause of Hitler’s Germany (p. 49). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The ‘no Free Will’ disability in detail
The following image (“The Simple ABCs of Free Will”) summarizes how free will works in the human mind.
Free will (SELF-control) is a single decision to halt the cortex so that the individual can pursue freedom of thought (no concurrent action by the cortex) in the prefrontal cortex. See “C” in the image below.
Generally, the decision-making of the SELF is relatively invisible to individual awareness and only as a fraction of the mind’s “sensory informed” action. Moreover, the part of unconscious thinking that is visible to awareness proceeds awareness by .5 seconds (see Benjamin Libet And His Consequential Experiment on Consciousness and sidebar). As a result, awareness may stop an action (Free Won’t), but it does not create it. This is true because if awareness were directly engaged in all decisions, the mind would become uselessly slow. A human individual would be at a competitive disadvantage. Human thinking, therefore, requires both a fast brain and a smart brain. Fortunately for humans, evolution produced both. The cortex is our fast brain, and the prefrontal cortex is our smart brain.
The challenge for homo sapiens is to develop both systematically. Unfortunately, smart people (using both their brains) develop civilizations. Then, civilization and the wealth it produces undermine the natural development process required to create the smart and effective people necessary to sustain it. From successful civilizations, cognitively handicapped people emerge.
Dysrationality is the form rational ignorance takes. Dysrationality represents homo sapiens with access to one of their brains, the fast (task-oriented) one–habit. Civilization mostly requires humans to be task-oriented machines. Robots. Automatons. Unfortunately, machine thinking produces Marxism, wokeism, and the like.
Atheists, Marxists, Nazis, and the woke do not have access to Free Will.
Dysrational individuals use the cortex (the SELF) for decision-making but are unable to shift their thinking as necessary to the prefrontal cortex preemptively. The cortex KNOWs only what it knows. In its entirety, the cortex is algorithmic and deterministic (SEE block A of image 3, above). However, note also that there is another integrated process that can incrementally and contemporaneously modify cortex decision-making. Psychologists call the process “operant conditioning.” Unfortunately, it is also algorithmic. It operates over the SELF but is limited to the beliefs known by the SELF. Operant conditioning functions to optimize decision-making for the needs of the SELF, given the specific and likely unique circumstances of the immediate situation. In this way, decision-making may vary according to the situation. Note especially that this incremental thinking is not Free Will. For dysrational individuals, decision-making is always deterministically driven entirely by what the SELF knows.
The cortex is the operational mind. It supports decision-making in the service of the self.
The cortex is the human fast brain.
This is not to say that dysrational people are limited precisely to what their SELFs know. They can accept and apply “truths” provided to them by their tribe. And once these truths are installed, emotions protect and insulate them. At this point, only reality (negative results/feedback) can correct them. Call this feedback experience. When the feedback is negative, it produces cognitive suffering. The cortex then incrementally adapts the SELF via operant conditioning. Fortunately, however, over time, cognitive suffering might also produce Free Will when the error in cognitive “truth” is large enough such that operant conditioning, or incremental change, will not work.
Ideally, Free Will (i.e., emotional maturity) would be developed early in life before countless false and bad ideas are carelessly or maliciously installed into the cortex. It is better that the individual learn to develop new ideas themselves. This SELF-learning process is the process of acquiring intellectual maturity. Note also that intellectual maturity in the prefrontal cortex produces wisdom; this is different than experience. Experience is results-oriented, i.e., what to avoid or pursue. Wisdom, in contrast, is understanding-oriented. It is strategic. Wisdom, however, can only be achieved through reason … which requires Free Will.
How Free Will is undermined
Education systems for our civilization have devolved into systems to teach “truths.” On some topics, this is patently indoctrination. Here, the individual acquires knowledge that is taught but not earned. Taught knowledge produces a prison of the known. These truths sit in the cortex, usually without the work undertaken to develop them to be simply retrieved and not “strategically” applied. It is a Potemkin village of truths; the facades exist, but the useful buildings don’t. The human brain becomes an answer-lookup system. The answers are banal habits.
Unfortunately, it is also possible to provide an individual with too many “truths.” Then, the individual is afraid to leave the comfort of the island of “known” (one’s taught knowledge). This expansive body of truths thus becomes a source of easy subject matter/task success. Unfortunately, innovation and problem-solving are its victims; recalling what one knows is generally all that is required. The thinker, therefore, gets good at what they routinely do—recall of habit. As a result, habit grows ever stronger.
If Free Will remains undeveloped, the individual is trapped by what he knows, protected by a jealous emotional exoskeleton committed to preserving and protecting the SELF. Unfortunately, without Free Will, operant conditioning could very well drive cortex-warehoused false or misguided belief systems into mental illness where cognitive success is no longer the focus. Here, the SELF becomes narcissistically the focus … of the SELF. SELF-control (Free Will) is likely permanently lost.
The prefrontal cortex is SELF-learning. It enables the pursuit of the unknown–it is NEVER decision-making.
The prefrontal cortex is the slow human brain. (the search for absolute truth never ends).
The pursuit of the unknown is easier said than done. While one’s ‘Free Will’ will halt habit (the cortex or the SELF), thereby making a shift of thinking from the cortex to the prefrontal cortex possible, without something else, your mind will not long stay there. A person’s mind cannot just go to nothingness. This is another problem for those trapped in dysrationality. They have not developed an alternative mode of thinking.
The solution is to acknowledge that absolute truth is actually or, in effect, God’s truth and that it is perfect. After halting the SELF, the rational person seeks to find a theory to explain why what they see is true. The ‘perfect part’ is key. Otherwise, an individual tends to dismiss or overlook what they see. They might conclude (decision-make) back in the cortex that what they already know is true. Habit. It is hard to shake.
As the individual intellectually matures, they develop the capacity to spend more time in the prefrontal cortex. With practice, the prefrontal cortex acquires more wisdom, making it easier for the individual to remain there (in the prefrontal cortex: see image 5). The individual, having acquired emotional maturity, is now in the process of intellectual maturing. This process never ends.
Epilogue
The dysrational movements above produce dysrational societies. Russia is a good example of this result. Few nations find their way to majority rationality. Yet, America accomplished it, and its Constitutional Republic form of government has sustained it. Freedom, a government of, by, and for the people, is social rationality in practice because it protects the free mind of its people. In fact, the American Constitutional Republic may be the only one of its kind.
When a civilization’s citizens, writ large, do not, or no longer possess free will (thus free minds), strong men rise to preserve their “civilization” (now a tribe). See How to Think About Vladimir Putin. Arguments developed by the people no longer govern the people; fear does. See Why the Russians Cut Off a Moscow Bombing Suspect’s Ear and Made Him Eat It.
I pray America does not follow.
Footnotes
- 1An irrational person is not thinking rationally, but they can. A dysrational person is pathologically unable to think rationally.