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Sacrificing Minds One guy recently argued that the free market is just a mechanism for distributing loot gained by seizing it from others, who are typically murdered in the process. While he is an engineer by profession, he doesn't view it as a productive achievement. He sees it as an act we have to go through in order to rationalize our part of the loot. He thinks his real profession is a murderer. Add to this his contempt for the poor which he considers incurably stupid, his belief that they are a threat to us bordering on barbarism, and finally his strong altruistic streak that claims that all of humanity deserves to be "compensated as human beings", and you start to see the chaos. Sometimes when I'm talking to people like this, I ask myself what could possibly cause this person to be so screwed up in his worldview. They make Marxists and Christians seem like paragons of rationality. You'd have to almost try to distort your thinking that much. And that got me thinking about why someone would try. In fact, there are some reasons why a person might sacrifice his mind. There are moral ideals in the culture that uphold the sacrifice of your mind as virtuous, or enlightened. A common example is the idea of faith in religion. In the bible, The Book of Job provides one example of a man tested again and again, to see if he can maintain his faith in his god. God allows Satan to keep destroying Job's life, giving him every reason to despair. His virtue comes from ignoring what is happening to him, and praising his god anyway. In practice, many religious people will excuse the bad things that happen in the world as examples of their god testing the faith of his followers. The stronger the case against a belief, the more virtuous it is to continue to believe it. The idea is that it measures the strength of your conviction. If you changed your mind easily, it would show you didn't believe it very strongly. But looking at it from an objective point of view, it means that people are inverting the epistemological standard, praising someone when his beliefs most strongly conflict with reality. A second example of a moral idea that upholds sacrificing your mind is the reason/emotion dichotomy. This is the belief that your emotions are somehow in conflict with your rational mind, and to fully experience your emotions, you have to be willing to ignore or shut down your mind. And in fact, the greater the irrationality, the greater the case for your emotion. Imagine a man develops romantic feelings for a woman, and asks her on a date. There's nothing terribly irrational there. But what if he serenades her in front of her friends? Or what if he quits his job on the spot to spend the day with her? Or what if he moves across the country without even meeting her in person? The more irrational the act, the stronger the proof of his emotions. Of course, if she's not interested, he's not romantic. He's a stalker. The point, though, is that when you throw logic to the wind and follow your heart wherever it leads you, you're sacrificing your mind. The fact that this is generally accepted as a wonderful, exciting, and romantic thing to do shows that is upheld as a moral ideal. A final example is the typical post-modernist coffee shop philosophy. "What if the world doesn't really exist?" "What if we just think that we think?" "What if we're just someone else's dream?" You know the type. The rule of thumb is to go down a line of thinking that would completely invalidate everything you know about the world. The objective is to cast doubt on even your most fundamental beliefs about the world. And the more powerful you make the argument, the better. The more irrational the results, the more successful you are. The further from reality you can go, the smarter you are. The practice goes beyond the walls of the coffee shop, though. A more general view is that the world is not black and white in any way, and is in fact chaotic. The belief is that we try to impose our preconceptions on the world, but that's not how the world really works. So those who are really enlightened are those who move beyond integration and principles. They are those willing to accept intellectual chaos, and master the art of living in a non-integrated world. These enlightened people scoff at those people who claim to understand anything. They know that knowledge is impossible, and that those who try to make sense of the world are childish and simpleminded. While not put into straightforward moral terms, this is still a moral ideal. It's upheld as the proper and right way to approach the world, and those who accept it are deemed praiseworthy. In each of the cases, there is a moral ideal that upholds the sacrifice of a person's mind. And in each case, the greater the sacrifice, the greater the virtue. In faith, the greater the hardships or counterevidence, the greater the virtue. With emotions, the more irrational the act, the greater proof of the depths of your emotion. And with the post-modern view, the greater the disintegration of your mind, the more enlightened and courageous you are. I want to distinguish these philosophical views from most others. Bad philosophy can have the effect of damaging your rationality. But that kind of destruction is usually secondary, and there is some other purpose the bad philosophy aims for. Rarely is the irrationality explicitly the goal. Contrast it to these moral ideals that seek the abandonment of reason as proof of moral virtue. Why is this so important? When rationality and understanding of the world is a shared goal, there is the possibility of communication and education. You may come from wildly different positions, but the shared goal makes it at least possible to get through to each other. But when irrationality is accepted as a moral ideal, there is no common ground to work from.
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