12:10pm January 27, 2012

They’re doing the same thing even if they can’t see it.

There’s two groups of people I’ve noticed who, under the surface, appear to have a lot in common.

One are a group of people I’ve often described as hyper-rational. This doesn’t mean the same thing as rational might mean, although they themselves certainly think it does. It means that they, consciously at least, use one particular part of their minds above all others. It’s fundamentally language or symbol based, even if they think in pictures or something else most people wouldn’t call language. It’s like building structures out of blocks. Putting idea-pieces together.

Anyway they are quite plentiful on the Internet. Usually male. Often libertarian (although some are the exact opposite – libertarianism just seems to attract disproportionate numbers of them somehow). Sometimes autistic. (I’m autistic too, this is not an insult. It’s just acknowledgement that this way of thinking is highly appealing among certain kinds of autistic people.) Often people who are also attracted to computer programming. Often “skeptics” (about certain topics anyway). Yes, these are generalities, but they do seem to happen a lot.

There are a lot of things that go on among such people that I’m not equipped to go into at this point. The main experience I’m going to talk about are situations where I’ve clashed with such people. Basically if you argue with them they will want proof. Preferably in the form of scientific studies. But they only want proof in certain areas, I’ve noticed. Usually those areas that conflict with their prejudices.

One such person was a friend of mine who always wanted me to cite studies (or damn close) if I gave the slightest evidence of believing that nonhuman animals were more than biological machines. Talk about an animal (other than, possibly, a great ape) carrying out an even rudimentary plan? She’d want proof. She in fact asked me repeatedly about “but can they plan?” when talking about anything from fictional cats to genuine cats I’d just described as planning something. It was as if we’d never had the conversation before, every single time the subject came up (or was brought up by her in all kinds of weird contexts). But she never demanded this level of proof when she was expressing a belief that went along with her interpretation of the world, even when that belief was seriously on dubious ground.

On the Internet, I’ve had frustrating conversations with similar sorts of people, usually around racism or sexism. They’d want large amounts and degrees of proof for fairly self-evident concepts like “racism exists” and “white people are not smarter than other people”. (They’d never accept themselves as evidence for the first statement, unfortunately.) They never accepted the fact that even their very method of demanding evidence and insisting on only one way of thinking about things and coming to conclusions could be tremendously racist, sexist, and disablist. Or that the culture that gave them these tools also gave them enormous amounts of power.

When people finally got fed up with them, they would tell us things like “See, that proves your views are entirely based on emotional biases rather than reason.” It was almost funny the way they never admitted their own irrational biases – they could rationalize anything to themselves and convince themselves this was the same as actual reason.

The other people I’m talking about always ended up arguing a good deal with the first group. They were people who seemed to sincerely want to make the world a better place. But they all acted like they were reading from the same textbook. They used a lot of jargon that inspired me to write an entire blog post on the (sometimes literal) headaches these words gave me. And they had a fairly rigid ideology that treated all forms of inequality as if they could be solved by applying similar formulas across the board. They had very abstract ideas, for instance, about what privilege meant, that didn’t connect to the real similarities and differences across different types. (Although some of them would use these differences to prove that their kind of privilege was the most important. And superficially complain about the abstractness problem while going right along with it in other ways. Basically power games. Like people who would totally stick to this formula when it came to racism, but who would claim disablism didn’t really exist – because it couldn’t be that they were just unaware of the devastating effects of disablism. It just wasn’t real at all.)

Anyway so you’ve got these two groups of people.

And both of them hurt for me to interact with. I mean actually cause physical pain in a very literal sense – I imagine, through some contortion my brain has to go through when interacting. What’s more, they cause the exact same kind of pain. And that always, always means something. It’s as if their thoughts, as communicated by actions and words, have razor blades attached.

I don’t know specifically what it means. I’m better at getting an almost sensory look at things like this, than at understanding what I’m seeing and feeling in the process. I just know that since consciously recognizing this, I’ve been much more careful in building cognitive barriers between myself and the source of pain. They don’t totally fix the problem but they give me a buffer zone. I also know that the two groups of people are actually doing something extremely similar underneath the surface differences. I just don’t have the details on what they’re doing.

P.S: I was on autopilot the first time I typed the final sentence. It first came out “I just don’t have the details on what those differences are.” People who think that if I chose the wrong words it would look glaringly out of place can bite me. I’ve had three decades to perfect my ability to churn out nonsense shaped as fully coherent grammar that looks on-topic.

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