OH, HUMANITY! THREE RECALIBRATIONS OF “RATIONAL SELF-INTEREST”

How to account for the effects of emotion upon rationality.


(EXPANDED on 11/19/13)
(EDITED on 4/18/14)

So if you want to build a functioning society, and you need to use rational inquiry to figure out a proper design, but that design has to take into account the fact that none of the actors in the society will be intrinsically rational, what do you do?

You look past the rationality that isn’t there, to the wider mental universe that is.

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The notion of "rational self-interest" is central to Western economic and political thought, and for good reason, but it needs three major recalibrations if we are to restore functionality to either system.


I. The self is not only not singular, it is metaphorically diverse. Human analogical intelligence causes the cognitive sense of self to expand, variously encompassing areas such as family members, prized possessions, beliefs, and political worldviews—my sister, my guitar, my religion, my party affiliation, and so forth. Through a process described elsewhere, these identity-extensions have become structurally entangled with the instinctive machinery of the physiological self, resulting in the vast and subtle world of emotions.

EXAMPLE: That is to say, if you threaten my job or my political worldview, my body must react emotionally, in proportion to the intensity of the threat. Cognition steers, but instinct drives.


II. The self is irrational, per the logic of intelligence. Human intelligence automatically integrates concepts from the bottom up as well as from the top down. This means that locally functional bits of understanding are often habituated without any regard for their global consistency. The flexibility we gain from this procedural logic is wonderful—cultural immersion and focused study are each valid forms of learning, and exploration of contradictory new ideas is not difficult—but it comes with a tradeoff: we cannot help but accumulate identity facets that are not fully rationally consistent.

EXAMPLE: When interpreting events, your perspective as a friend will sometimes conflict with your perspective as a co-worker, or as a parent. Where you stand depends on where you sit.


III. The spotlight of attention is far narrower than the reach of the metaphorical self. All identity-related facets are defended by emotion, but your conscious awareness can only attend to a few of them at any given time. These two factors combine to make a fully rational accounting of the self doubly impossible, while also giving a false sense of rational consistency. The actual dynamics, which encompass classical rationality without being bound by it, are much more interesting.



SYNTHESIS: the three recalibrations in action!

On informational grounds alone, conceptual discrepancies are easy enough to miss. Rational introspection requires conscious attention in order to work; the narrowness of human attentional focus permits only small subsets of beliefs to be cross-checked at once; tenuous analogies are just as easily internalized as rigorous arguments; and deeply internalized bits of understanding are so easily taken for granted that they are often overlooked during testing.

But emotional effects add a whole new type of obscuration.

Instinct as emotion: The instinctive defenses are very old, and they were not designed to handle jumbled self-images, analogical or otherwise. Consequently, their physiological defenses of the jumbled identity constellation are applied to the human body simultaneously, across-the-board, and quite impartially, without regard to consistency of self-image.

This makes the overlapping emotional defense of many conflicting ideals a universal hallmark of the human condition.

How does it play out? Well, whenever aspects of your personal identity come into conflict, your instinctive machinery simply responds to the circular threat by rendering the areas of contention emotionally uncomfortable to think about. This is experienced as cognitive dissonance.

This applied instinctive pressure solves the problem of identity protection by deflecting the spotlight of your attention away from the identity conflict (see below), sending it in search of more comfortable waters. The force of this deflection is roughly proportional to three things: the personal significance of each identity facet in question (how important?), the urgency of the issue (how immediate?), and the proximity of the attentional spotlight (how relevant?) to the area of conflict.

EXAMPLE: "He was a good kid, he never would have tried to rob anybody. That isn't him in the surveillance video."

The multifaceted analogical structure of human identity ensures that many, many such aversion gradients are active at any given time. They operate for the most part under the attentional radar, although most of us do tend to notice the stronger surges.


The logic of deflection is straightforward... In the short run, it is simply less painful to maintain conflicting identity investments in the dark—they were adopted for good reason, and they work well enough when considered separately—than it is to risk losing any of them to the light of rational inquiry. Pretzel logic is preferable to ritual sacrifice.

...and its consequences are significant. Unfortunately, it also means that you don’t know what’s really down there, because the very areas that are most in need of rational introspection are among the hardest to reach. Sharp attentional limits, a mobile attentional spotlight, and ingrained identity-driven deflections combine to make us think we are more rational than we actually are, often with disastrous results. They also prevent many of us from noticing that our attention is being internally deflected, or even suspecting the existence of the emotional investments that are driving the deflection.


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Again, cognition steers, but instinct drives. Even if you have managed to notice that there are places your thoughts won’t go, there is no guarantee that applying cognitive counter-steering will take you there. Counter-steering takes mental energy; the emotional currents are too numerous, too quick, too dynamic, and too complex to be mapped; and the very reason the currents exist is to mask the conflicts that such a map would reveal. Moreover, in areas of extreme personal importance, the maelstrom of emotional deflection can become forceful enough to sweep the spotlight of attention entirely out of operating range, making certain lines of questioning literally unthinkable.


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AN APPLIED EXAMPLE: the three recalibrations in politics.

Consider how differently the old and new versions of “rational self-interest” handle the time-worn cliché of circular political discourse:

If you were to logically refute a cherished political position of mine, then the classical reaction of my “rational self-interested” self should be to reconsider. If I have been wrong, would I not improve my chances by accepting the better understanding that comes with the more accurate information?

In my "recalibrated" self, however, that option frequently loses out to faster, gut-level, emotional inclinations. Instinct dictates that I rescue my beleaguered identity-position, by:
1) saying “Oh yeah, but what about this?” while
2) slipping the anchor on my besieged attentional spotlight,
3) riding its automated deflection across the identity constellation;
4) settling into whatever emotionally fortified position it is drawn to (there is great strength in anger) and quickly returning fire; in hopes of
5) deflecting you from your initially effective attack, in exactly the same way that a mother bird whose nest is endangered feigns an injured wing to draw away predators.

6) Rinse, and repeat.

I never have to change my mind if I don't stay in one place long enough to witness any of my positions being destroyed around me. Is this not the classic pattern of political conversation?


Defense in Depth

These emotional tactics are deeply unsuited to figuring out what is going on the real world, but that is not their purpose. They are simply an unreasoned manifestation of instinct, an unthinking method of protecting already invested identity-beliefs, no matter how contradictory. This is often all that matters in the heat of battle.

And they are remarkably effective. So long as I am arguing with another person and not with an unfeeling real-world event like a car accident, my beliefs and I can evade existential conflict more or less indefinitely. If you follow me to my new position and refute that one too, then I simply repeat my escape maneuver, and around and around in circles we go.

What’s more, the defenses have defenses. If I have strongly self-identified as an intrinsically rational person (a belief only made possible, ironically enough, by the same sharp attentional limits that preclude intrinsic rationality), then any of your insinuations that my cherished beliefs might not actually be rationally consistent will be loftily dismissed, and my defense will be to find fault with you for being uncredentialed, unreasonable, or just plain mean.

Finally, if you do somehow manage to corner me rhetorically in spite of my tactics, then as a last resort I can simply disengage! I can change the subject, change the channel, leave the room, tune you out, put down the book, deny everything, or turn off the computer. Or, on a darker note, I can call in allies and attempt to bully you into submission.

Instinctive self-preservation is powerful stuff.


To be continued...

Fortunately, robust strategies exist for turning the vicious cycle against itself, but I will save them for another post. For now, I will merely hint that both the informational and the emotional aspects of human irrationality arise inexorably from the very same logic that enables us to construct rational arguments.

This human logic is universal—we really are all in this together!—and it unfolds as a direct consequence of putting analogical thinking, habitual pattern recognition, and a limited attention span into a body defended by instincts.



In other words, Pandora's box isn't a box at all, it's some sort of Klein bottle.