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sexta-feira, 7 de março de 2025

About an old discussion: who is more irrational, the left or the right, and a new thought

 What is more irrational, mediocrity or madness??


I have already written some texts based on this question in the title, more specifically two texts. In the first, I compared the left and the right based on the historical context of colonial Brazil and concluded that it is the right-wingers who are more inclined towards irrationality, not only because they are more likely to justify slavery, but also because they are more inclined towards religious belief, an extra and traditional dose of adherence to magical thinking. In the second text, I ended up concluding that the more rational ones would be more likely to not become so ideologically biased, contrasting an older text of mine, about highly rational individuals, in which I stated that they would be more likely to adopt progressive beliefs more vigorously, also based on the long history of embracing obscurantism by the other side, the right.


A new thought about this discussion, according to what I have been thinking, is that the comparison between those on the right and those on the left, in rational terms, is equivalent to the comparison between different doses of rationality, or rather, irrationality, in which the first group would be excessively restrained in their intellectual approaches, and therefore more conservative, expressing a more mediocre way of rational thinking, while the second would be excessive in its intellectual approaches, and that, without a quality filter of thoughts and ideas, becomes a more risky and mistaken way of rational thinking. Therefore, it is the clash between mediocrity and madness, between going too little beyond primary good sense, which is usually called "common sense", and going much further, but more in a sense of inverting it, reiterating the condition of the left, which has given itself, as an antithesis of the right, and not as a synthesis or a true moral and intellectual transcendence, as it seems to proclaim.


But this does not mean that right-wingers are, on average, less irrational than rational. It does mean that they are less irrational than left-wingers. Nor does it mean that conservative thought is perfectly cautious. Traditional religious belief alone shows us that this is far from true. (Still, it is interesting to think that, if from a thought I had about it, it is possible to consider it radical, in the sense of imprudent or hasty, and also conservative, depending on the perspective. If from a purely rational perspective, traditional religion, but also any other form of magical thinking, is tacitly an extraordinary statement without extraordinary evidence, a speculative leap without any logical basis, treated as absolute truth. And if from a historical-cognitive and evolutionary perspective, religious belief among humans would be the conservation of the universal and extremely basic modus operandi of living beings, self-centeredness, of primarily perceiving reality from one's own perspective, instead of doing so in a more objective way, shifting perception to the objective instead of self-projection).

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