Yes, Sir - No, Sir - All Bloody Fools

Imagine being out on a space travel in a spaceship and you fall out of the ship. You are floating all alone in the starless space, OR, imagine being in the medieval era thrown in a dark dungeon by the king’s men. In both the cases the time would cease to exist for you, let alone the senses. 

Human mind is programmed to perceive and process only the relativity, an irrationality in absolute sense. It takes at least two to tango. Adam & Eve did it for us and from the irrationality of the two, we are eight billion plus today. Two are company, few dozens a society and billions of us are definitely contributing to a chaos. Nonstop cacophony on the social media is a proof of this chaos.  

To date, human mind is considered to be the best processor of information. Considering the compactness of this clever machine, its not difficult to guess that it deploys many a clever hacks and tricks in order to construct the world around us by processing the data it receives in bits and pieces through our highly limited sensory peripheral devices.

The Israeli-American psychologist and economist, Kahneman, introduces two engines that animate the mind:

• “System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. It controls the reflexes and our day to day routines and cognitive tasks, such as identify threats, navigate our way home on familiar roads, recognize friends, and so on.

• System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations and philosophical thinking. It helps us to analyse and solve complex problems, do math exercises & crossword puzzles, and so on. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.”

System 1 is an intuitive system that cannot be turned off; while System 2 is like putting brain in higher gear which takes effort and energy to engage. So, the brain tends to take shortcuts at the behest of System 1 and what follows is a saga of fallacies.

As we grow old, we strengthen our bents and biases by selectively savouring the information on the social media fish market served in the form of saucy fiction (Gossips or propaganda is the right expression). Out of prejudice we keep jumping onto conclusions and form new opinions consuming selective story after stories. A feeling of personal enlightenment hits us as our newfound knowledge fits into the larger story that romantically and naively endorses our age old beliefs and prejudices and thus the sense of righteousness.

This behavioral sickness of developing preferences, bents and beliefs without much thinking puts us at the risk of manipulation. By exploiting these weaknesses in the way our brains process information, social media platforms, governments, media in general, and populist leaders, are able to exercise a form of collective mind control. Most of the time we don’t understand what’s really going on. We think we’re in the driver’s seat and steering the course of our lives and nation, but we are wrong. We are the victims of illusion and vicious agenda of few.

But we aren’t helpless. We can learn to behave responsibly. Instead of being impulsive or prejudiced we can take time to dive into the vast sea of information out there on internet. Google it to read the other side of an argument or narrative.  Integrate other points of view with other perspectives without being judgemental or prejudiced.

Prompted by our CPU 1, it’s natural for us to compact the complexity of our rationality into crisp commoditized ideas. But we must remember our rationality is infact the irrationality of relativity. It is impossible for us to define rationality of an event from a single frame while it is impacting billions of other frames. There will be multiple sides of a story.

What to do in this case? Gather information from various sources (not selective); logically analyze arguments; try to avoid jumping to conclusions; don’t become a part of the fiction. 

“Question everything, learn something, answer nothing.” - Greek playwright Euripides.

P.S.: Reading about rationality and cognitive biases, after all, does not free anybody from their nasty epistemological pitfalls. So, lage rho Munna bhai.