What I mean by, "I disagree with everything," is really, "I can't agree with anything," and the reason is that early in life, I shot my elephant.William wrote: [Replying to post 48]
Purple Knight: No matter how hard I try, I am always disliked everywhere by everyone, because I care only about logic and thus agree with nothing.
William: Hi there Purple Knight.
I am not following the logic of your statement here. It appears to me that you are mixing fantasy with the factual.
There is a sub-forum on this message board, where your claim can be tested in an environment where no one is allowed to dislike anyone else.
I invite you to participate. You are allowed to be logical and don't have to agree with anything except the initial rule which gets you in the door.
It positively thrills me to know there are others on the forum that are familiar with this metaphor. Here's a quote:
This metaphor has cropped up repeatedly with different metaphorical subjects and every time I've seen it, it has spoken directly to me.wiploc wrote:In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics And Religion, Jonathan Haidt uses a metaphor about the mind being like a human riding an elephant. The rider is the conscious reasoning mind, small, weak, and yet it thinks it's in charge. The Elephant is the unconscious mind and the emotions. The elephant mostly does what it wants, while the rider mostly acts as a press secretary, "My elephant is turning left here. Left is good! Left is good!"
I won't try to develop the metaphor here, but Heidt has this quotation I like:
Your elephant knows which way to lean in response to terms such as pro-life,
and as your elephant sways back and forth throughout the day, you find yourself
liking and trusting people around you who sway in sync with you.
Very, very early in life I realised I had an elephant and I shot it, though then I just thought of it as an id, though not just my impulses, but my biases.
I wanted to challenge everything, to go on a quest for truth that led me down horribly dark paths because I couldn't even have that same disgust toward racists everyone else had. I looked at everything, even bad things, with the same objective perspective. When my parents said I had to tolerate everyone, and all views, my response was to bring home a neo-Nazi.
To this day I don't think much of what racists say is factually incorrect, but I will absolutely concede that treating everyone equally is an absolute moral necessity regardless, because it doesn't matter what the statistics are about groups - you simply can't punish anyone who's done nothing wrong, ever.
I realised later in life that I was wrong to shoot my elephant and I've tried desperately to ride other peoples' elephants to no avail. Their beast always bucks me, because it's not my beast. I have no idea if I'm liberal or conservative, or rather, if I would have been liberal or conservative, since I shot the poor thing before I had a chance to figure that out.
All I know is that I believe in the principle of noncontradiction.
And it's a sad knowledge to have, because I ask questions, and sooner or later, I'll ask something that exposes a contradiction, and get my face slapped for my trouble (not necessarily literally but you know, peoples' reactions). I wish I could tell them that I'm not trying to pick apart their beliefs, I'm trying to adopt them (moral beliefs, not religious ones), but I always seem like the outsider because I have no elephant to tell me when to sway. To me, they seem like vacillating idiots, always changing their principles on a dime, but I would give anything for one of their elephants.
If I could choose, I would take a Libertarian or Leftist elephant, since these philosophies seem to attract the people with the greatest confidence in their own views' correctitude. In the face of this, I remain what I am, and my instinctive expression of the reverence I have for these kinds of views is nothing short of viciously dismantling them.
I don't think I'm free from bias, but I'm probably about as close as a person can come, and every moment is pure concentrated misery I have more than once thought to put myself out of.