This is a very very very very important point.
This is why I keep talking about expensive beliefs.
If the rationally indefensible is the point
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3 responses to “If the rationally indefensible is the point”
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Cults are irrational by design, because they need to cultivate loyalty, not reason.
I favour Occam’s Razor here: the simplest explanation is the best. On reflection, I think that it must be hell on Earth to live convinced that one has been born in the wrong body: particularly as a male when one ‘should’ have been female. Such people can understandably become quite angry and potentially dangerous to those they perceive to have been lucky enough to have been born in the right body, as genuine XX women. The losers in this sexual lottery, can unsurprisingly take out their frustrations on those they see as the winners; understandably, but an absolutely wrong and evil course to take.
Worse still for them than the biological reality of their birth sex, is the fact that there is absolutely no way out of their situation for them: they are stuck with it for life. But, as the old saying goes, misery loves company.
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@Omar,
I think the rationally indefensible behaviour is seen more among the activists who defend “trans” than by trans-identifying people themselves.
The trans population itself is small and mostly a hodgepodge of people in various states of mental disarray, disorder, and distress. (Well, plus a lot of horny chancers and charlatans.)
The progressives who back the movement are much more numerous than the trans-identifiers themselves, and this group, a great, rabid cheerleading squad, seems to be caught up in a spiral of tribalist-identitarian loyalism, and this spiral seems to be fueled in large part by the fact that the tenets at the heart of trans are plainly unbelievable.
Belief in extraordinarily unbelievable things is a remarkably consistent feature across cults and extreme religions. That’s probably got something to do with how it pits the rational part of the brain — the one that can detect bullshit if it actually applies itself to analyzing the thing — against the tribal part of the brain — the one that says anything that might threaten your tribe or separate you from it is a threat that must be shut off. Ergo: if your tribe believes something crazy, you must shut off your critical thinking function or you could be ousted from the group.
The internal conflict between the two impulses of the mind is like a Chinese finger trap: the harder your critical thinking mind tries to pull out, the more your tribal-loyalty mind tightens its grip.
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Artymorty:
The internal conflict between the two impulses of the mind is like a Chinese finger trap: the harder your critical thinking mind tries to pull out, the more your tribal-loyalty mind tightens its grip.
Interesting stuff. I have long maintained, after the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, that in any religious ceremony, the group is actually worshipping itself. Believing is the means to belonging, which IMHO adds a new dimension to the old saying: “The family that prays together, stays together.”
‘Family’ can include ‘tribe,’ ‘clan,’ ‘platoon,’ ‘battalion,’ and a number of other such collective terms.
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