THE RATIONAL AND THE IRRATIONAL
I was working in an art collection where a computer controlled chandelier broke down. The old computer controller needed to be replaced as it was loud and bulky, and when we replaced the system with a smaller computer inside the wall, the Curator was shocked to see us open the wall with a razor blade and a hammer. To open dry-wall you don’t need some special tool, you need a razor blade, a hammer, enough grit to do the job, and the skill to put it back together.
For this type of work, you can’t get bothered by doing monotonous, routine tasks, over and over again. You have to “man up” and do the work. Mike Rowe has become an unofficial spokesman for this old-right mindset. The type of work highlighted on Dirty Jobs is hard physical labor, and while a significant amount of nuance and skill is required, the amount of time spent on labor far exceeds the amount of time spent on planning the task.
On the other side of the divide, you have mainly knowledge laborers. These people tend to have some sort of skill, and that skill is usually in a cultural tradition. They tend to spend their time thinking. Their work has less to do with actualizing the physical and is more concerned with optimizing the ideal. With mental labor, your mind is not free to wander and you have to spend your time rationalizing scenarios.
Out of all the possible ways to dissect the split in the old-left and the old-right one of the more overlooked angles is what type of work they do for a living. The majority of the right’s voting base and the vast majority of the left’s voting base do very different types of work. Because they do different types of work, they meet different types of people and that changes what they think is the basic model for human thought.
The important thing to note is that the natures of the tasks are very different. With physical labor, the task is defined. “Move that rock fifteen feet to the left.” It’s hard physical labor. That’s a very different question than, “What is the best use of this rock for society?” The second question is undefined, it has no answer. So in this environment, the skills used to answer both questions are exactly the opposite.
For undefined-open-ended questions your goal is discussion. You want to come up with as many different scenarios as you can, then debate those scenarios by playing them out by telling cohesive stories. For known tasks, the open-ended discussion is abject laziness, “We know what we have to do. Just do it!”
You can see how these very different types of thought processes create a very different view of the other side. The right’s view of the left is that they are lazy, entitled, stuck in books, pay to much attention to theory, and don’t know about the actual nature of reality. The right thinks the left is a bunch of nerds.
The left’s view of the right is that they are uneducated brutes who don’t know how to think rationally and only respond to appeals of simple physics, ad-hominem, and emotional attacks, over using logic and reason. The left thinks the right is a bunch of irrational idiots.
How did this happen? Why are there seemingly these hard differences in how we think? It goes back to an old division that has been wedged open by modern politics. And to understand it we need to re-think, how we think about thinking.
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“You are being completely irrational,” she turned and said to H-74. He looked at her. “Irrational?” He said. “No, I don’t believe so.” The wind swept dust over the android’s metal foot as he held open the heavy canvas door. Vivi looked back at him. He saw the concern written on her face and responded, “You don’t think I’ll make it?”
“That storm would kill anything.”
“That’s why I have to go– there is a chance she is still out there.”
“It’s a box, H. It’s not even an Android.”
“She’s a system, to us it’s all the same. And when I’m around her, she changes my system. I can’t live without that.”
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How do we value the irrational? Is there a value to irrational thinking? Would it be better to always be rational? What does being rational even mean?
The answer seems obvious. Of course, it would be better to be rational all the time, right? It seems like we have set up this picture, where we strive to be rational, but sometimes the needs, or pressures, of reality step in and make us act emotionally.
Rationality seems to be the better system, but that goes against our everyday experience of human behavior. We know we do not behave rationally, but irrationally and consciously. What if there is a hidden limit to rational thought, and in order to understand and to move forward with our culture we must understand these limits and come to understand irrational systems– systems like human consciousness.
How does irrational thinking show up in people? We say things like, “Surely you don’t believe that?! It goes against scientific fact?!”, “I can’t believe that! It goes against what it says in the Bible.” In each example, the person objects to something not because of a universal reason but because of reason within a narrative. They even name the narratives in their objection. To the other side, the “reason” seem completely illogical and irrational.
Rationality doesn’t stem from some innate state or ideal truth, but rationality is a feature of narratives. Rationality is using reason to tell a cohesive story. Something irrational in one story could be completely rational in another story. By organizing the irrational through reason, we tell stories that create a narrative that defines a culture. Rational thought is the ability to use the culture’s symbols in a cohesive way that makes sense of our world.
Some of our deepest motivators are irrational. It is completely incoherent to create a story where the ending is your own demise yet “Love” is a sacrificial story where you end your life, your central core story, or your ego, for the sake of another. And “Hate” is an irrational story where you end your life, or ego, to destroy another. Neither are rational, yet both are extreme motivators. Fear in this regard is not a motivator but stops motivation from happening.
Instead of looking at people as rational agents that are tortured to go against rationality, by shifting the focus to a narrative-first model things start to make more sense. A narrative first approach to rational thinking asserts that the narrative you are using is primary before “reason and logic” to predict some one’s behavior.
This is not a mystery either, we know that primates are symbolic creatures, humans perhaps the most so. In tests where there is a “mystery box” with levers and buttons. Human toddlers are instructed to memorize a sequence of the buttons, and they will get a candy reward. The toddlers and Chimpanzee were both able to memorize the sequence for the reward. However, when the “mystery box” was replaced with the same box but made from see-through plastic, the Chimpanzees realized the sequence was not affecting the outcome. Since the candy was already there, the chimps just grabbed it, but the human children did not recognize the candy was available and continued to do the meaningless sequence. The humans stuck to the narrative that was given to them.
(c) National Geographic
Humans are not rational, we are ideological. We make up stories and narratives that define meaning in our lives. Out of these narratives, we discovered rational thought, which is a type of cohesive narrative structure. Often rational thought feels more like a critique than creativity because it is checking for cohesion rather than striving for expression. The problem and the beauty of this view is, that because rational thought is contained within a narrative it cannot judge the narrative– as judging narratives is outside of rationality’s domain. Rationality can only look for cohesion within narratives, not value between narratives.
The domain of rational thought is within narratives and known stories. Since rational thought is derived from, and a feature of a narrative, you cannot mitigate a clash between narratives by using logic. In order to see the use of a narrative, you must entangle yourself into the culture to learn how meaning is defined through their traditions, then explain your position using that tradition.
The tools of rational thought have been learned through tradition, and are not obvious. It has been a critical error in current western thinking, to assert that rational thought has been an innate quality of civilization when it was learned.
We are clearly not rational beings, but humans who follow ideologies. If this is who we are we need to stop projecting a false sense of rationality and come up with a model for understanding irrational behavior. What dictates, not whether the story is cohesive and rational, but that the narrative is worthwhile to begin with? This is where we enter into irrational critique– the realm of the human and the awesome power to pass moral judgment.
Rational thought is not moral thought. Rational thought is objective. It looks at the connections in the narrative and looks for cohesion. Does the system play by its own rules. Morality is not asking those questions, it is less concerned with cohesion, and asks if the story is worth telling in the first place. “What’s the point?” “Do I enjoy this?” “What’s the moral of the story?” Moral thought is a subjective assertion of values or goals based on experience.
Aesop’s fables are a good example of something that is not rational to scientific reality but shows a moral claim. The Tortoise and the Hare could be debunked as, “Mere foolishness. Hares can’t do all the things in the story, nor do animals talk. Obviously, this is stupid and not based in reality!” But to then claim it has no meaning would be missing the point.
We are left dealing with a more complex world, one where the human conscious experience is not a mere binary, do-you-have-it, phenomenon, but consciousness has a character to it that can express moral rational, immoral rational, moral irrational, and immoral irrational behaviors through ideologies. This seems to be closer to my experience.
A Moral and Rational Failure:
“Rationalism” and the “Free Market“
To understand the split in our country we have to look back a much bigger split, the split of the rational and the moral, and how they used the narrative of Rationalism, and the narrative of the Free Market to gain influence.
“Rationalism” in my definition, is trying to understand the world, “as it is, without guesses or conclusions.” The old “Ding an sich.” Rationalism is a narrative of rationality or a narrative that claims to be the most cohesive. Rationalism has proven to be extremely useful, leading us from the enlightenment to our modern scientific tradition. But rationalism is still a narrative, and narratives can only be critiqued by a subjective moral claim. Science as a public entity claims to be unveiling the “truth of our universe,” and “the scientific facts.” Yet when the experience of living in a rational world is no longer fun, fulfilling, or capable of providing a structure to pursue happiness, people will quickly abandon the “scientific-facts” for any other ideology that gives them those opportunities and fulfills their desires. Even if those desires fly in the face of the modern scientific tradition. So rationalism is only good, or cohesion is only good if the results are worthwhile to live in. Or when the rational narrative: “an internally cohesive story that defines our reality,” can uphold to a moral critique: “Does this story, or culture, give me an experience that provides benefits and a structure to pursue my intent.”
The world of morality is brutal, it is the law of nature and written in blood. It is not ideal. When someone upsets the moral order you feel it in your gut, you know it’s wrong. You don’t need to logically calculate it. The realm of moral claims is scary and unnerving to followers of Rationalism because it threatens their worldview and reveals rationalism as subservient to physical brutality. Moral claims are always protected and modified through violence. It is the physical law. This spear will pierce and kill, it doesn’t matter how your rationalize your own death, you still die.
The moral world, and I mean the realm dealing with “morality”, is not rational but brutal and physical. Reason is protected and defended through violence which undermines the position of rationalism as the primary container of reality. So the failure of the old-left has been in dealing with irrational actors who do not ascribe to American ideology and values, and the inability to keep up a moral society that lives up to our creed of “liberty with justice for all.”
If the failure of the left has been the narrative of Rationalism, the failure on the right is the narrative of the free-market. If the left is irrationally asserting that they have an actual rational system, that is not based on a moral claim but a rational claim, the old-right has in perfect symmetry asserted that the free-market creates equal and moral societies by mandate. Yet we live in a time where markets actively reward and are defined by the people with the most power and morality has been thrown out the window.
So both sides, in irony, betray their own values. They are each drunk on the other sides medicine. On the left, the attempt to define a purely rational system has led to an irrational assertion that all people are rational and equal in ability and intelligence. On the right, the search for “free-markets” has lead to corruption and markets that oppress people rather than provide opportunities for people. These so called, “free-markets” look a lot like a like a new feudalism.
It all seems like a catch-22. We seem to be getting more extreme on both sides. The so-called “moral right” has failed to affect any social-policy and for the past 40 years has been losing ground consistently to the “immoral liberal crusaders in Hollywood”. At the same time, the old “liberal elite” has failed at passing any systemic policy reform trading to the Old-Right special interests gains for fiscal policy reform and America has continually shifted farther and farther to the Old-Right.
How is this possible? How did we both go further to the Old-right yet from the perspective of a conservative further the to Old-left at the same time?
America: Id, Ego, Super-Ego
The American class system has three divisions that are represented by two parties. To understand our model of how we moved to the Old-Left and the Old-Right at the same time, we must figure out the “political deal” that defined the groups and alliances.
The first, and lowest, class in America is the Id class. This is the class with no actual political power. Power in this definition is, do you get any of your intent done, does anyone follow your will. This group also tends to be “true believers”, they follow the narratives and believe in the central stories as if they were real. The Id gets very upset at challenging baseline narratives, things like religion, the “free-market”, and individual freedom. This group would tend to believe in things like, “there is always someone better than you.” Or, “everyone has a boss.” They tend to be hierarchical and used to submission, they look up to their leaders and choose to believe that, “life might be rough, but it is a fair deal.” In actuality, the Id class is very much trapped in their situation having no ability to move out of their position en masse.
The second group is the Middle class or, the Ego Class. These are, in a healthy period, the people that do the most work actually executing the various complex functions of American life. This is a semi-merit based game where hard work does pay off, and you have some agency as to how to function in society. While the work you put in is completely beneficial to maximizing your personal experience it usually does little to affect change in the game itself. Most of the Ego Class is concerned with themselves, maximizing their own outcome. As they, individually, have little influence on the society at large and trying to affect the society at large is to their own personal detriment. The Ego class is a competitive class where choosing not to compete is not an option and has real consequence to your personal outcome.
The third group is the super elite, the storytelling class, or the Super-Ego. These are the people through, either their position in the hierarchy or through individual skill in being able to affect a culture, create and defend the actual narratives that define the lives in the culture. They may or may not actually believe the narratives, yet the power results in control to define the base interpretation of reality. These narratives determine what the Id thinks is “Fair and Just” yet they are often used to mask brutality as freedom, to control the populace, and to obfuscate injustice rather than create a more fair society.
This group would say things like, “Well it makes sense to the market that I, the CEO, make 500% more than you because if I didn’t get paid that much the demand for a CEO would dictate that I go to another company that can afford the market price. You see, it all makes sense, I’m just worth more than you.” Yet at the same time, they are creating what defines that “Market-Price.” It’s double speak and full control.
The three groups blend across all of American Society and just because you may have elements of one class, doesn’t negate you from the pressures of your current position in the hierarchy. For example, a surgeon may be very wealthy but also a member of the Id class, not because of the fact that they couldn’t choose to write their own narratives, but they are so busy they never took the time to realize that narratives exist and only chase their own pleasure within the narratives that present themselves.
Conversely, an artist may be extremely poor, but if they have the ability to affect a culture on a large scale they would be a member of the Super Ego class. Yet, because of the current structure of capital, artists tend towards not being fiscally sound and trade their own skill in narrative creation for fiscal remuneration in order to live.
Now with the base understanding of the three ideological groups that define the psychology of America, we can take a look at how it plays out squeezed into a two party system.
The Ratchet
A system of winner take all politics that ratchet the division between the classes where the elite have taken all the spoils. Want to know who designs your system, and why we keep losing? Just follow the winners.
The Ratchet is our model for the system of division. A system made by design to maximize the power of the super-ego class away from the ego class.
Since Nixon, the Republican coalition has been made up by a strange alliance of on one hand the: Moral Right, Evangelical Christians, White-traditionalism, conservatives, and on the other hand: the super elite bankers, fiscal planners, right-wing intellectuals, free-marketers, and capital owners.
The democratic coalition has been made up of mainly the Ego Class, which was the college-educated white workers, labor unions, new-dealers, and the majority of minorities.
The economic turbulence of the 70’s caused a reaction against the New-Deal and the era of Reaganomics swept in, to counter and clean up, the perceived overreach of government.
The southern strategy gave Elite Republicans the voting strength to re-attack New-Deal programs, from which just years before, Nixon and Eisenhower, both successfully defended.
Finally, the Democrats, who had historically been the champions of the New Deal’s bureaucratic system felt that it was no longer defensible in the face of economic collapse, violent cities, and the loss of faith in the New-Deals grand vision.
The left capitulated the “grand vision” of a free-society by design spelled out in the New-Deal and shifted to identity politics, personal freedom, and fighting for the social equality of marginalized groups. We went from the Old-Old Game of the New-Dealers versus the Anti-New Dealers to the Reagan-Era game of Globalism, and Personal freedom through the free market.
This is the Ratchet. The Reagan era set up that created the divide:
1. Because of the turbulence in the 70’s, people on the left and right demanded a new system.
2. Using the power to control the narrative the small in number Old-Right elite, allied with the ideological conservatives, as defenders of social traditionalism. Yet at every turn, traded against that alliance to liberals for fiscal reforms privatizing and creating the corporate economy.
3. It was packaged as Individual-Freedom, the Free-Market, and Globalism.
4. Individual freedom was sold as expressing yourself through how you shopped and consumed rather than how you created and lived.
5. Globalism allowed corporate interests to shift labor overseas, undermining American values, as our labor laws did not shift with the labor. This allowed for American corporations to take advantage of markets conditions that are unethical in America and export out slavery.
6. The elite class, who did not care about “personal freedom,” as they already were as free as possible, traded fiscal policies such as NAFTA and the repeal of Glass-Steagall for social rights that they already had and were only withholding from marginalized groups as leverage for the fiscal reforms.
The New-Deal coalition that used to be the old buttress against the anti-new deal corporate interests dismantled leaving a power vacuum. The Reagan Era Old-right finally accomplished what the elites were trying to do for years and get rid of the New-Deal, but this time they did it through moral critique. They appealed to the emotions of the nation using an actor, a professional story-teller, to set up a new story of government excess. And they granted freedom not to people, but to corporate interests.
By having an alliance with the Id Class, the elites could have the populace to fill in their voting block. At the same time, the Elite always had an evil for the populace to blame, by withholding basic rights from marginalized groups, and creating the liberal backlash. They could blame the failing of basic necessities that the new deal provided, on the corrosion of traditional society by the “liberal crusaders”. The Elites on the Old-right traded superficial social reforms that granted rights to a very small part of the populace to get very large systemic gains by changing the way we bank and how we determine value.
This is why it seems like we are moving farther to the left from someone who is in the id class on the Old-right. Your leaders go around presenting themselves as champions of “conservatism”, but trade those ideals for fiscal policy reform– what the Elites on the Old-right really care about. The liberals always think they are making gains from these trades, but by sacrificing the fiscal reforms they find themselves in an environment shifting further and further to the right. The Elites on the Right, blame all the problems on the immoral liberalizing left confusing their Id-class alliance counterparts, never getting called out, and hide in the confusion.
The Elite are the big winners, as evidenced by the corporate control, the terrible environment for new business starts ups, the writing of policy by corporations, the control of powerful positions, the absolution of guilt for corporate elites, corporate welfare through subsidies, the lack of interest in the desires of the common man, and the creation of an America that is desolate, divided, confused, and angry.
Hillary Clinton represented exactly the old system. The old game where liberals through identity politics, traded in fiscal reforms for social gains for minorities. Which are great and needed gains, but after forty years of slowly trading small gains for marginalized groups at the expense of the core of the narrative, the environment we lived in went to hell.
The Elites have taken far too much of their share, leading to instability and despair. Globalism has brought in the new Corporate American Culture asserting a new international feudalism that cheap foreign labor is “good for business” at the cost of American communities and the quality of life of international laborers. Profits are record-breaking, yet globalism siphons off money from American working class towns and isolates profits to the higher economic divisions, leaving laborers unemployed, starving for work, exploitable, and cheap.
The Id class in this new environment went looking for answers as to the downfall of the quality of life. “Why does this hurt so much?” The Id class looked at their adversaries: the liberal-elite who want social progression, and mistook the gains in social progression for the cause of the bad environment. Yet in truth, it is their own leadership selling them out.
This is the environment we have found ourselves in. The old-right coalition of the Id class with the Super-Ego, broke up as the Id class rebelled from their leadership looking for something new, and from their point of view, effective. Their frustration is real as they have experienced forty years of double dealing, getting nothing of their own intent passed– ie, actual “conservative values.” Yet in seeking a strong man to push their own agenda, they voted in another elite, against their own interests and values, but also against everyone else’s interests. The Id rebelled, but it was not smart enough to know what to rebel from.
What do we need to rebel from? What do we need to change to get back to a more human environment?
By following our values we can see what each side cares about and determine sensible positions that incorporate both points of view. The most radical thing in this environment is to stop rebelling and to create out of our values.
What are the values of the old-right and the old-left? The old-right has an appeal to morality. They are much less concerned with narrative cohesion– or rationality. Moral critique asks, “Is this a life worth living?” It is about envisioning yourself in a place and saying, “do I like this?” When the narrative of the left, the narrative of rationalism, said that “life is an accident, you are meaningless, there is no higher purpose,” the Old-right imagined that world and chose not to live in it. The logical end of rationalism is not necessarily pitched as a meaningful, or happy place. So the values of the right are moral values that are subjective and based on experience, even if they don’t seem grounded in reason.
The old-left values rationality so much so they set out to define a completely rational world. Rationalism was a groundbreaking and beneficial ideology that lead to science. Yet for all of our progress, our rational system has yet to define meaning and purpose in our lives because The nature of Rationality is not an actual moral claim, but the search for cohesion, which is a feature and not a function of a narrative. The function of a narrative is to provide meaning and to give you a cultural structure in which you can express yourself by how you choose to engage within the construct. By focusing too closely on rationality, the Old-left could not follow through on the purpose of the narrative and society in the first place: To give structure and meaning that makes sense of the physical chaos.
So we are left at a loss. The current administration’s response to this divide is not an advancement, but a return to brutalism. This will not work as it is the Luddites response. It doesn’t realize that the environment that has changed, and old tactics will fail. The current story the Old-Left is spinning will also not work. It invalidates the disarrayed Old-Right’s Id. The only way forward is not to invalidate them, but to encourage positive behavior. Instead of mocking religion, offer interpretations that fit science. Each side should take the other sides advice. Unrational thought offers more insight about the ideal and how we should live and experience life moving forward, yet Rational critique can give us the best understanding of where we came from. It’s as simple as realizing there are benefits from both questions: “what ought to be?” and “what is?”
