RATIONALISATIONS

REFLECTION
Wednesday 15th April’08

As human beings we usually tend to reason out unintentionally with our emotions. Sometimes what we see, hear, smell around us may play on our primary emotions of happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust and anger. These experiences contribute in overpowering our reason and thus swaying our judgements so as to satisfy the emotion that was felt. For example when a child has an ice-cream for the first time, the tactile pleasure that he will get shall instigate the emotion of happiness and he would want to feel this emotion again and again. He would generalize that an ice-cream is equal to happiness. On the other hand if one sees a drunken man, physically abuse his wife by slapping her repeatedly and openly, it would instigate anger within us. If one sees a similar incident again after a week or so, this anger would be directed towards trying to help such women and one would generalize that all drunken men beat their wives.
These generalisations when negative become prejudices. From then on we do not reason in a holistic manner with evidences from science, literature, math, art and ethics but we look at only evidence that supports our bias and we form a belief with a conformation bias that is illusionary as one has not looked at the counter arguments. A vicious circle will be formed and this uncertain belief would end up becoming stronger.
Sometimes this can be a source of motivation like in the example of the drunken man and the helpless woman. The people may ending up taking strong action against this social issue and thus help the society. But if the prejudice is more against a race or a particular group of people then this cycle could make them a fanatic as history has proven to us with examples like Hitler and the Al Qaida. Such a thing also happened in America during the 1950’s and 60’s civil rights movement where racism against the black people lacked all logic. In the 1950 some whites really feared that the wave of civil rights for the black Americans that was spreading was a threat to their own way of life because they would have to compromise on their sophisticated culture. There was also a sense of disgust at this thought cause of the skin colour of the blacks compared to the ‘pure’ one of the whites’. This formed a biased perception and backed by influenced newspaper reports (many of them fake to instigate anger against the blacks as the newspapers themselves were owned by the Whites) and one ignored all the good things about the Black Americans like their contributions in the first and the second world wars. This fallacious reasoning leads to emotive language that is filled with anger and hatred against the Blacks. And thus leads to even more powerful emotions against them. In America this cycle led to the formation of the Ku Klux Clan and many secret killings of the Black people. There was abuse, physical and emotional, beatings and unfair segregation.
This is rationalisation and many times the effects are horrifying as the example signifies.