Why communities make bad decisions

Why Communities Make Bad Decisions

I. Everyone gets all their information from one source, or all sources of information have one point of view.

II. Common ways of thinking rely on binary oppositions

A. especially in regard to:

1. epistemology (naïve realism v. relativism; certain v. clueless)

2. judgment (good [immediate] or bad [indecisive])

3. this hierarchy v. chaos

4. us (narrowly defined ingroup) v. them (membership in any other group)

5. a single group is identified as Godly (so anyone else is Satanic)

            B. the rational/irrational split (it doesn’t matter which one is privileged)

1. certainty is a feeling, so that one can tell instantly whether a proposition is true since it feels true.

2. something is “factually true” if it confirms a deeply-held (and very important) belief (instead of being a proposition about external reality that can be falsified or verified in ways that even people who disagree can see—that is, true things are subjectively, rather than intersubjectively, true)

3. facts and data are synonymous,

a. and data is assumed to be true if it supports a “true” proposition

b. claims and evidence are not assessed in terms of relevance, so a conclusion must be true if the evidence is:

(1) CB should be President because 2 + 2 = 4.

(2) CB should be President because bunnies are fluffy.

(3) CB should be President because 2547/568.321 =4.48162218

C. and/or that operate as “paired terms”

1. agreement/disagreement :: loyalty/disloyalty :: submission/dissent

2. punish/reward :: action/inaction

3. manliness/queer :: specific achievements/anything else (for instance, in the proslavery era, being dominant over slaves; later, being dominant over African Americans; now, owning a big gas-guzzling vehicle and having a house that uses a lot of energy)

4. just world hypothesis (this hierarchy is just, so any other system is unjust)

III. There is a flattening between discourse and violence, so that verbal criticism is attack (and therefore it is “self-defense” to respond with violence to criticism of the ingroup).

A. Male members of the ingroup, although in control, are not in control of their response should the outgroup “provoke” them,

B. and are therefore not responsible for their own actions

C. Mote/beam projection: any action of the ingroup (e.g., unlimited violence) is justified if any behavior of the outgroup can be counted as offensive (e.g., resistance)

IV. There are large numbers of authoritarians, or authoritarianism is entrenched as the ingroup ideology

            A. aversion to/fear of uncertainty;

            B. aggression framed as the “normal” response to anxiety/fear/threat;

            C. strong father morality

            D. most (all) problems can be solved with adequate will

V. Ingroup has high entitivaty

A. boundaries are heavily policed, purity highly valued, and “loyalty” to other group members trumps other ethical standards (especially in relation to non-group members)

            B. group membership matters more than policies

                        1. so policy debates are framed as indicative of group identity;

2. raising issues of feasibility betrays the ingroup (and is therefore disloyalty, and lack of will)

C. the feelings of ingroup members claim ontological grounding (that they feel fear is sufficient proof that there is a threat; that they feel certainty is sufficient proof that a proposition about reality is true; that they feel lust is sufficient proof that a woman has behaved seductively)

VI. Because identity is more important than policy

A. one deduces the effectiveness of proposed policies from principles shared by ingroups

B. rather than by inducing their effectiveness on the basis of previous times that policy was used.

C. Advocacy of policies are used to infer feelings; the assumption is that people with the right feelings will enact good policies—policies are presumed to be necessary consequences of good feelings and good judgment