I recently I shared with five American Democrats a Messenger comment that questioned the California 2026 U.S. Mid-Term results. Three responded, at some length, with their own evidence refuting both the figures and the conclusion. I fully expected a fourth to respond similarly. The Mid-term results were clearly an issue of great importance to these gentlemen. But of course it’s not just that: they were important in relation to the side they're on. The Messenger comment challenged foundational beliefs, held in this instance by Democrats, and generated an immediate and opposing, gut reaction. (Unfortunately I had no American Republicans to hand, to balance the results).
So here's my contention: I submit that only thereafter was rational evidence amassed to justify that initial, visceral response. But the assumption of each respondent would have been that his evidence was stand-alone and self-evident; that it was "objective"; that it was the cold, hard, independent justification for the subjective, visceral response. This, I am arguing, is back-to-front. The gut reaction found the "rational" response by a process of affinity which reflected the gut reaction, resulting in an infinite loop of self-reinforcing value that left any explanation objectively unaddressed.
It is the mental objectification of value that creates much of the frustration and mutual incomprehension that drives and keeps people with different views apart: "Are you stupid? Can't you see the evidence I am presenting? What is wrong with you? You are irrational!" Comment sections are full of this stuff, rapidly deteriorating into 4-letter mud-slinging contests between people with different values. Even absent the vitriol the incomprehension is there.
Please note, before we go any further, this is not an attempt to analyse Democrat psychology. This is an attempt to demonstrate how we all actually relate to the world.
In my reply to the three (very gracious) respondents I quoted an ironic definition in The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce -
Deliberation - The act of examining your bread to see on which side it is buttered.
The relevance of this may not have been contextually clear, but it did clearly contrast rather radically with the Merriam definition - "The act of thinking about or discussing something and deciding carefully."
Popular belief echoes the latter, but politics (which is all about popular belief!) seems to me to confirm the cynical Mr. Bierce, for politics is demonstrably not "objective", not "scientific". It is entirely about the subjective: What are my values.
This circles back to my proposition, that values precede and determine thought, not the other way around. Reasons are assembled to justify a pre-existing belief, value, or state of mind. The belief, value, or state of mind, regardless of its intensity or lack thereof, precedes and selects the intellectual apprehension of the supporting argument, by which it is then confirmed to the satisfaction of the speaker, who then experiences surprise when the listener fails to be swayed by his supposedly watertight logic.
If this proposition (it isn't mine, It derives from the radical empiricism advanced by William James, and later expanded by Robert M Pirsig) is valid, it upends the currently accepted belief that the truth is something "out there", separate from the person who alights on it. I'm saying explanations are not a priori objective like that. They are value-guided, cherry-picking exercises in which the ripe cherries are noticed, because they evoke - and thereby draw attention to themselves - the same values as the initial gut feeling. The result is a self-reinforcing, circular argument centred on the initial gut feeling, that doesn't actually explain it in terms of anything external or solid. You either share the value, or you don't.
If your value tree bears plums, oranges, or mangoes you won't be impressed by the "rational" arguments of a picker who prefers cherries. In fact, you will reject them, or ignore them altogether! If his arguments do impress you it'll be because you share those particular values too. This is about values, it isn't about cold rationality. Rationality taken alone is lifeless. It cannot, as I've said elsewhere, distinguish between babies and bathwater. It must be linked to human values in some shape or form if it is to enter human consciousness.
Our beliefs, left unchallenged, do not stimulate thought. The thinking process is only awakened, if at all, when a belief encounters an obstacle. Unless and until that happens we run very comfortably entirely on automatic, "just following orders". When jolted by a challenge, belief unthinkingly selects the evidence which, by affinity, attracts it. What follows is rationalisation ("This feels to me like clinching proof!") triggered by the spontaneous, electric stab of recognition.
This chain of affirmations is what we know as meaning. Meaning is not a chain of connected, objective facts: that is an oxymoron. Meaning is a chain of connected values.
But, once selected, the evidence does indeed take on all the characteristics of what we call facts. It seems solid and external, but any meaning it contains is supplied by our pre-existing values, and by nothing else.
Thus, before we can respond to a stimulus - before we can engage in supposedly dispassionate deliberation - we must first "examine our bread, to see on which side it is buttered". ("Examine" sounds laboured. In fact the apprehension of value is instantaneous ,arising immediately upon the application of a stimulus.)
Without first recognising what's best for us in any given situation - an activity which is unthinking, spontaneous, and automatic - no relevant thought can occur. This doesn't just apply to politics, it applies to everything in which we have an interest. Interest is essential, so this absolutely includes scientific theory, which claims to be above subjectivity, but isn't. For one thing there's no science without scientists. They do the observations. They come to the conclusions. They write the peer reviewed papers. Their methodological treatment of the values they investigate simply gives those values more durability, makes them more reliable, more convincingly clothes them with the appearance of factuality - all attributes that ephemeral politics makes no attempt to emulate, and this makes politics a better vehicle for introducing radical empiricism!
Basically, it's "Me first!" "Me" being the sum of my experience, of which I am empirically the centre. Outside of my experience nothing (meaningfully, empirically) exists. I must, therefore, draw others into agreement with my experience, and they draw me into agreement with theirs, for community and therefore society to exist, and grow.
A great deal more follows naturally from this - the absurdity of multiculturalism as a meaningful concept, for example - but this is more than enough for now, and congratulations if you made it this far!
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Pablo
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