What should you make of the fact that you are passionate about your position on an issue?

Is that passion justified by real world facts and a careful and conscious cost/benefit analysis? Or did unconsciously adopt your position as a result of becoming a member of a tribe? Did social pressures and desires nullify your intellectual defenses to bullshit, allowing rickety beliefs to find a welcoming space in your head? Did you aggressively attack your new position, making sure that it is solid? Or did it slip in like the trojan horse after your sentries became completely distracted by their cravings to be liked (and not disliked) by others? After all, because called “inappropriate” “misguided,” “a tool for the [bad people]” or “racist” hurts, especially when done in public arenas. Those slings and arrows take a toll and they have put Americas institutions at great risk. It takes a special person to be able to shake off those accusations and stay true your need to hyper-scrutinize all issues, especially your own position on those issues.

It takes courage and strength to constantly attack your own ideas and it needs to be constant because truth-seeking is never-ending work. And it’s not enough to try as hard as you can to be skeptical of your own ideas, because we are blind to the problems with our own thought process.

We know this for sure, based on the work of many scientists who have studied the confirmation bias, including Jonathan Haidt:

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.

From The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

You can’t cure this problem alone. You need to expose yourself to viewpoints you find distasteful or even odious. That is the only solution because the confirmation bias is that strong. You cannot see the problem as long as you are clinging only to your favorite sources of information. You need quit being a coward and engage with people and ideas that challenge you. You need to visit websites and read books that you would rather not. That is your only chance to test your ideas, identify those that work and don’t work. This need to constantly expose your thoughts to the marketplace of ideas was described with precision by John Stuart Mill (and see here). Recently, Jonathan Rauch has taken a deep dive on this challenge in his excellent book, The Constitution of Knowledge.

There will be many who read this who say “I’m not concerned because I am immune to both dumb things and the pressures of tribes.” They are wrong to be complacent for two reasons.

Reason One: People think they are immune because they feel certain that they have things right. They feel this way even though ALL OF US change our opinions over time. We are guaranteed to change our views in the future just as we have in the past, but we don’t remember how much we change over time.  We simply sit there smug and certain that we’ve got things figured out at each present moment. What is that feeling of certainty worth? Nothing, as explained by Robert Burton, in his book, On Being Certain.

Then what are such inner feelings of certainty? Burton holds that the feeling of certainty is an involuntary sensation akin to an emotion (p. xi). In the preface of his book, Burton warns us that once you start seeing the feeling of certainty as a non-intellectual feeling, rather than evidence of well-earned knowledge, you will start seeing this problem of feeling of certainty cropping up everywhere you look.

There’s no doubt that unjustified claims of “certainty” are used by almost every person and almost everywhere. Burton has thus highlighted a critically important distinction that needs to be brought to the fore: the mere fact that one “feels” that one is certain is not worth a damn when the thing that needs to be decided is incorrect. Important claims should be based upon dependable knowledge, yet numerous people claim to be absolutely certain about false things all the time, and they often use their inner feeling of “certainty” as a misleading substitute for hard-earned knowledge.  When they rely on certainty rather than knowledge, they are engaging in intellectual bait and switch.

Reason Two: We become members of tribes without knowing it.  It’s the frog in the pot problem. There is no conscious sign-up procedure for becoming a member of a tribe.  It happens over time that we drift toward some people and away from others and this affects our thought process without any awareness that we are taking on and rejecting an entirely new set of values and opinions.  Too bad there is not conscious sign-up date for joining a new tribe, where you walk up to a window and sign up, receiving warnings that your opinions are about to change without your awareness.  But there isn’t, meaning that you are signing up without knowing it and this is putting your intellectual thought process at risk.

I know this is rampant speculation, but I do wonder whether people (like me) who tend to avoid any allegiance to tribes are more able to maintain our heterodox thought process. For instance, I am often getting looks of disapproval from family and friends when I discuss serious issues.   I think I see a lot of evidence for that among people I know, but it’s simply a hunch.  I have a habit of ignoring the Overton Window and I crave the companionship of like-minded others (those with whom I can disagree civilly).  If I am correct in this hunch, beware if your end goal is to be liked by your tribe! In past times, this would put you at great risk to uttering (and claiming to believe) religious nonsense such as the claim that Mary was a “virgin” even though she gave birth to a baby.  In modern times, people are falling away from religion in great numbers, but traditional religions based on a “god” are being replaced by other types of “religion,” including the religion of Wokeness, which relies heavily on tribal pressures to evoke its own versions of nonsense.  Follow this link for more on McWhorter’s book, Woke Racism.