this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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Relatedly, I think this is related to why at some point people convinced themselves that they were completely rational without really trying. A lot of the people -- on the right especially -- have convinced themselves that they live on some type of post-rational plane and that everything they do can be rationally justified. If you point at any of the pile of fallacies about one particular thing they do, say, or believe, they will try to distract you with their credentials or use other illogical arguments to defend those things...one at a time.
semi-related anecdote
Many of the people I worked with in tech that are "libertarian leaning" operate this way. They think because they work in tech that they are, by default, rational thinkers. I would also say that most of the people that are like this are extremely bad at their jobs if you dive into the details. Because, unlike them, I have found that working in software has taught me that I am very fallible and often irrational in minor ways. Programming a machine that executes nearly flawless logic at speeds the human mind can't match demonstrates plainly that we are endlessly fallible, often emotional, and almost never understand the full implications of our actions. But many of these people never seem to learn that lesson, and on more than one occasion I have had them discover "flaws in the compiler" that were simply them being idiotic upon closer inspection.
If you read any Greek philosophy they basically say the opposite thing, that man can occasionally reach for rationality or try to behave rationally, but that it is by far not a person's default mode of operation. They considered it basically communing with the Gods during the rare moments that man could even achieve a scrap of it for a period of time.