Читать книгу Uncomfortable Ideas - Bo Bennett PhD - Страница 6

We avoid uncomfortable ideas in three main ways: we avoid entertaining them, we avoid accepting them, and we avoid expressing them. These processes can be deliberate or done subconsciously or have components of both. Many of the same reasons we avoid entertaining uncomfortable ideas apply to why we avoid accepting and expressing these ideas. Refusing to entertain an uncomfortable idea is a conscious decision not to think about, investigate, or consider evidence for the idea. There are dozens of reasons why we do this. Many times there are multiple reasons combined that cannot be articulated, but we just “know” that an idea is not up for debate or consideration. The problem is, virtually all of these reasons are irrational; based on biases, cognitive effects, heuristics, fallacies; or other obstacles in reason.

We can, and do, accept ideas without entertaining them. We do this all the time when we trust authority, when we are raised with a certain idea, when we are cognitively exhausted, or if we are gullible and just not very good at critical thinking. While accepting a good idea for a bad reason is better than accepting a bad idea for a bad reason, it’s best to accept a good idea for a good reason. In other words, entertaining the ideas we do accept or thinking critically about them is an important component of reason.

Back to our opening question. If you were to immediately reject the invitation to attend the presentation by the Neo-Nazi group simply because you think Neo-Nazis are “animals,” you would be refusing to entertain the ideas in what might be a mostly subconscious process. If you were to agree to go but sat through the entire event with your arms crossed uncritically dismissing every point that was made, you would be refusing to entertain the ideas in what would most likely be a deliberate thought process where you decided ahead of time that if you heard anything that made sense, it would only be propaganda and lies. Perhaps you did entertain the ideas critically while recognizing your biases, and now comes the time when you decide if you accept the ideas or not. This is the most difficult part. As we will explore in this book, you might have perfectly reasonable justifications for not accepting the idea, but there are many ways in which our brain “protects us” against uncomfortable ideas, no matter how factual and true they might be. Remember, truth-seeking and understanding reality are not the goals of evolution; survival and reproduction are.