Thoughting #5: Essentially a reiteration

 

Your TPS is in a dark sludge mood. For no reason but pique, I added this to Slate.com comments:

I just discovered that one of the courses in the curriculum lead­ing to a Bach­elor’s degree in Paranormal Science at Thomas Francis Univer­­sity is “Critical Think­ing Skills.” I can’t think of a better existen­tial oxy­moron than this to represent the bank­ruptcy of human nature.

“Bankruptcy of human nature”? I’d say so, as I see the human brain to be so screwy that it must, alpha and omega, maim the world through all its history. My example is an emblem of our main flaw: We believe we are thinking clearly and rationally when we are immersed in delusion.

As I’ve explained many times in these posts,* for the neurotic, reasoning is bent to psy­cho­logical survival. A mother “knows” her son is innocent of murder while the rest of society knows he is guilty. Millions of citizens name the virtues of Donald Trump, while the majority of us know he is a misanthrope, a sociopath. Here’s an example from my own arsenal of neuroses:

As a latency-age child, I was too immature to be able to use my mind in a healthy, ener­getic way. I couldn’t engage with anyone beyond my anxiety. Simple games – little league baseball, child­ish board games – were acceptable. But to be interested in some­thing as complex as chess would have been as beyond me as space travel would be to an ant. So now I can grouse to a client that “All those chess moves just always seemed arbitrarily deterministic. It would be like requiring novelists to write longhand with thick gloves on.” Though I was being purposely silly with my client, the fact is the middle third of my brain thinks that chess is a ridiculous game, a waste of high-altitude thinking. That’s to say, I have reified my attitude as a factual delusion.**

We think stupidly, self-supportively, because we are wounded children in an adult world. Our reasoning keeps us from knowing we are still “back there” in critical ways. We believe our thinking is valid and discerning. We believe it is right to be a “people pleaser” or a member of QAnon. We believe Buddhist philosophy, Jewish mysticism, Christian theology. We believe “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent” (E. Roosevelt) and “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” (F. Roosevelt). We believe we are “daddy dom” roles. We believe one political party is right and the other is wrong. Who knows how many of the world’s memori­alized, carved-in-granite ideas, principles and wise sayings, Shake­speare to Rod McKuen, genius to YouTube dilet­tante, are the warp of idio­syn­cratic and repressed childhood feelings of their thinker? Most of them?

Fortunately, our escape from knowing this comes in the form of one of modern civilization’s most entrenched memes: Everyone has a right to their own point of view, which somehow is respectable. In fact, only psychology understands how every cognitive emanation from the person is valid: Everything makes sense according to our injuries.

We believe what we think in order to medicate ourselves. Thoughts are our drug of choice.

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* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2015/03/curmudgeon-1-thoughting.html

https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2018/05/thoughting-finale.html

https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2018/05/thoughting-3-peterson-mask.html

https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2020/06/thoughting-4-truth-will-let-you-be_20.html

** The topmost third fully grasps the error of this delusional thinking. The bottom-most third is, of course, the ungrown child who needed to be helped out of his immature state.