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Self-Deception: Psychology and Meaning

February 16, 2018

Philosophy

citizen, ignorance, reason, responsibility, self-deception, society

Until recently, I lived with a certain false assumption: that people would want to know the truth. Furthermore, I used to think that once people discovered the truth (even accidentally) they would never be able to reject it. How can you hold an unjustified false belief, right? But recently, I realized that I was wrong. There are indeed people (who knows, maybe they are a majority) that prefer self-deception over truth.

In other words, such people prefer the beautiful lie instead of an ugly truth. Or, rather, they prefer to beautify the lie so that they don’t have to ponder on the possible qualitative attributes of the truth. Furthermore, I’ve discovered something incredible, which shouldn’t even be possible, according to philosophy and epistemology. Unlike what I mentioned above, there seem to be many people who can hold an unjustified false belief.

In plain English, they are capable of believing something that isn’t supported by evidence and is false (and, the implication is, they know it to be false). In other words, not only are they performing self-deception, but they do so knowingly and willingly.

Let’s take a closer look at this phenomenon – I’ll also throw in a story connecting Jesus and Donald Duck 😛

self-deception
Knowledge is justified true belief
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Bandwagon Fallacy; or, Welcome to the Internet

January 28, 2018

Philosophy

citizen, democracy, fallacy, reason, social masses, social media

Being ignorant is bad, but being ignorant while pretending to know is even worse. I was browsing the topics of an online forum, and a thread on the democracy of ancient Athens drew my attention. One of the participants mentioned Plato’s praise of democracy as a form of government, and several others agreed.

Now, that in itself was surprising to see on a forum (and a Greek forum, to boot), since you’d expect someone bothering to comment on such a thread to know that Plato despised democracy. But there was worse in store for me: I came face-to-face with the Bandwagon Fallacy – or Appeal to Popularity. Welcome to the Internet.

Bandwagon Fallacy
Athens was the birthplace of democracy, Plato established the Academy in Athens, ergo, Plato loved democracy, right? Well, some guys on the Internet think so, therefore who am I (or Plato) to say otherwise…
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Collective Responsibility in the Era of Idiocy

December 30, 2017

Society

citizen, idiocy, ignorance, reason, responsibility, society

In a previous article, I spoke of idiocy of a particular kind, that of people who are too self-centered to bother about the world around them. Of course, this kind of idiocy and selfishness also leads to mediocrity. Furthermore, there is a certain paradox in the phrase “the world around them”: it implies a certain separation between those people and their environment. This is obviously untrue. These people’s decisions and actions (or, rather, inaction), affect their environment, a fact which in turn affects them too. And still they remain apathetic and refuse to take responsibility.

The problem is, since we all occupy the same world – and in our era of globalization it is impossible to truly become isolated – even those who do think and act, and are responsible, are also affected.

responsibility
You may think you’re separate from your environment. You’re not.
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