Flipflop wrote: ↑Mon Feb 15, 2021 4:15 pm
I agree with all that you say........but what is the reason behind the psychology? Why do people find it so hard to admit they’re wrong and even if they do can they change it?
Well I'm a bit of an existentialist in my thinking. I think we have the power to change ourselves far more than is often presupposed. I don't really like the idea of predetermination, or 'fate' as it's sometimes called. We are responsible for our actions and for their effects on others, and we should not shy away from them. Of course my atheism sits alongside that too. There is evidence all around us of people changing their mind, or taking a stand, or challenging preconceptions - and it very often has produced some of the most vitally important positive changes in our society. If traits were dominant and unalterable, in a kind of social darwinian way, nothing would ever have changed, there would never have have been any revolutions, any progress in the fields of culture and science etc. It's lazy and complacent to assume that nothing much can be changed in the world. The fact that bad things happen and often keep happening does not make them inevitable in future and does not make it impossible to change them.
That's the more philosophical side of it. The psychological aspect is harder, and it depends on how individuals react to difference as they encounter it. If we were somehow hardwired to behave in a set pattern of ways, we would not see the diversity of actions, opinions and views that we do. Sure of course, there is genetic predisposition - that's a well proven fact - but the vast number of examples of where we are able to break out of conformity, confront long-held prejudices, challenge norms and insist on the value of truth are testament to a far more creative human character than mere pre-programmed genetic code can account for. As ever, there is nature and there is nurture, and there is learned behaviour, and will to change etc..
Uh Oh, I might be about to disappear up my own arsehole. Time for a G&T I reckon. Meanwhile, best to end on a great quote from Douglas Adams, writing about his idea of the Babel Fish:
“Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.”