“Politics is a killer of the mind.” - Eliezer Yudkowski.
Your mind is like a computer.
Your brain is hardware, your worldview is software.
The operating system you run is highly dependent on your culture, upbringing, education, and many other factors.
Of course, a well-functioning mind is a mind that can update its operating system.
As new information becomes available, a healthy mind revises its previous conclusions about the world to account for new data.
The smartest people in the world do this:
- read constantly
- study
- experimenting
- renew their understanding of the world.
After all, the more accurate your models are, the better you will be at making decisions.
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This is true in almost all areas of life. As renowned economist John Maynard Keynes said:
Dogma as malware
Armed with this understanding, we see that an unhealthy mind is a mind that does not want or cannot renew itself.
Rather than expanding and revising his models to absorb new information, he will warp the data to fit his existing models.
This issue is well covered by the brilliant billionaire investor Charlie Munger's favorite folk adage:
What makes the mind so distorted?
In a word, dogma. Absolute faith of any kind.
When the mind is convinced that something is irrefutably true, it stops renewing its views on this area of reality.
Thus, any dogmatic ideology can be viewed as a kind of malware or virus trying to infiltrate our computers (our brains).
Dogmatic ideologies, be they religious, political, or otherwise, essentially try to convince your mind to freeze in a certain form and stay that way for the rest of your life.
And a frozen mind, as a rule, unable to renew itself, will be very bad at adapting to a complex world.
Unfortunately, confidence in a particular dogma makes us feel comfortable. It makes us feel like we are in control, as if we know everything. As a result, many minds are frozen by dogmatic malware.
This is an unfortunate state of affairs, since we humans cannot afford to be maladaptive at this stage in history. We face significant challenges and we need our collective intelligence and decision making to be as sharp as possible.
8 symptoms of political malware
One way to avoid contaminating the mind with dogmatic malware is to learn to recognize warning signs.
If you spot other users' faulty operating systems, you will most likely be able to debug your own.
Political malware is far from the only malicious dogmatic software, but it is widespread enough that it will be useful to learn how to recognize it. And naturally, many of these points can be extended to other areas.
Here are eight common symptoms of a computer brain infected with political malware:
1. Failure to explain the arguments or evidence that led to current conclusions
Highly functional minds don't just believe in things because they feel good or because someone told them. They require evidence and arguments to support their positions.
If a person cannot explain the evidence and / or arguments that convinced him of a particular political conclusion, it is highly likely that he or she holds that belief simply because his political tribe does.
2. He never says: "I have no opinion on this matter, because I have not studied enough and did not think about it"
Dogmatic, maladaptive minds tend to have opinions about everything. Even if they have not thought about this issue, they simply agree with it by default, since this opinion is popular with their environment.
Healthy minds, on the other hand, are extremely humble. They understand that the world is complex enough and that it is really impossible to get an informed opinion about everything. They are honest about what they don't know, and they understand that they have to be careful about forming opinions because people are so good at deceiving themselves and drawing premature conclusions.
As genius physicist Richard Feynman said:
3. Considers belonging as a sign of honor
Whether they are Republicans or Democrats, radical or centrist, libertarian or fascist, conservative or liberal, you know them because they advertise it.
They pride themselves on being part of their particular team. But when a person is truly proud to be part of something that requires certain beliefs from them, what are the chances that they will be able to renew those beliefs when faced with new information? None. Sharp minds value truth over command and generally lack strong political affiliation.
4. Views do not change over time
Ask the dogma about your thoughts on a particular political issue, and then ask them again after five years. You will almost certainly get the same answer. No added nuance, no. "Well, I thought about it more and my view is a little different now." Same old scenarios, recurring anomalies.
5. Quickly becomes hostile in political conversation
When someone becomes a follower of a political team, this makes his politics a truly deep, important part of his personality, and it becomes extremely difficult for him to have a calm conversation about an idea.
When he challenges dogmatic political reason, he does more than challenge their ideas. He's challenging his team, his political tribe and his personality: the cornerstone here is their sense of security in this universe.
Healthy minds, on the other hand, are interested in the truth, or the best solution, instead of maintaining their sense of tribal pride. Therefore, they can consider several positions on the same issue. For them, ideas are just ideas, and they want to find as many good ideas as possible, let them compete and determine which is the best.
6. Absolute belief in the correctness of your own views
There is a reason Jordan Greenhall uses the terms "Blue Church" and "Red Religion" to describe the two main political monoliths claiming power in the West.
He is not the first person to notice that for many people, politics has become a form of religion. With the secularization of the West in recent history, it is no surprise that the religious adventures of the people have been diverted into another dogmatic realm.
In contrast, adaptive minds expect to be wrong. The idea that they have somehow reached the ultimate truth of reality seems ridiculous.
- Elon Musk
7. Adhere to the opinion "If you disagree with me, you must be my enemy."
For highly dogmatic minds, any disagreement is interpreted as an act of war. If you disagree with them or even offer an alternative opportunity, you should not be on their team, and if you are not on their team, you should be on the opposite team - the enemy team.
This black-and-white thinking gets worse when there are only two large political parties in a country, as is the case with the United States. In a well-functioning bipartisan system, both parties should at least be able to cooperate, find a compromise, and understand that each ultimately seeks to improve the country, despite disagreeing on how to do it.
Unfortunately, with the deeply divided and polarized political climate of the United States in 2018, bipartisan cooperation and understanding became impossible for many people. This is a grim omen of the future.
Adaptive minds recognize that disagreement is okay, and that communicating through disagreement provides an opportunity to explore and refine their views. They also understand that black and white thinking does not take into account the complexity of the world. They see that it is unwise to rigidly classify someone as an enemy or as a member of a particular tribe based on several of their positions, given that there are potentially endless positions that can be on any given issue.
8. All points of view are identical to the points of view of one political camp
If you can guess a person's stance on climate change, social welfare, immigration and gun control based on their stance on an unrelated issue like abortion, you can be reasonably confident that you inherited tribal dogma and not formed their own conclusions.
The call to subscribe to dogmatic ideology is that there is an answer to everything. You simply repeat the views that are popular with your tribe, and you never have to worry about analyzing individual issues for yourself.
Active minds, by contrast, hold complex, nuanced, unpredictable views because they analyze each issue on their own. They look for the best arguments and evidence to support different positions on this issue, and they draw their own conclusions. Or they are often agnostic about certain issues because they are faced with real complexity and do not feel confident enough to support one persuasive view.
Conclusion: Activate Your Mind
A healthy mind is a mind that renews itself based on new arguments and evidence.
Cultivating this form of mental health will serve you well in all walks of life. This is important if we hope to continue to thrive as a species and help other terrestrial species to thrive.
Humanity is currently in the midst of an unprecedented global change. In such difficult and unpredictable times, we certainly need to be adaptable and open to good ideas wherever they come from.
Attaining wisdom begins with each of us: with our individual decisions to activate our minds - to actively pursue more knowledge and understanding.
Individuals' need for their own knowledge and cognitive abilities goes beyond politics. The degree to which we are collectively successful in this endeavor may well determine whether we will create a utopia or an apocalypse in the coming decades and centuries.