In their own ways, conservatives and liberals both look to social approval, sensory evidences that might be illusions, hearsay, subjective persuasion, and conscience (purely subjective moral feelings), making a host of assumptions along the way. Now that the onset of COVID-19 has passed, their virus-related controversy has evolved into an a pathetic clash between a group that is so clearly just trying to find random, irrelevant excuses to avoid taking the vaccine for COVID-19 and a group that desperately reveres appeals to authority directed towards scientific figures they subjectively respect. None of these developments is out of character for conservatives and liberals, but their shallow pretense of alleged rationality, a pretense even a new rationalist could see right through, is completely gone.
Conservatism and liberalism are inherently based on unprovable or outright false assumptions and anyone who believes in them must by necessity be irrational, a fool worthy of mockery, dismissal, and ideological rejection. Their errors multiply as soon as they start getting more specific in their thoughts and claims. When it comes to the vaccine, conservatives (especially ironic given that this group likes to pretend it cares about true Christianity) tend to have little to no regard for making the pandemic easier for those at greater risk even to the pont of not doing something as comparatively small as wearing masks around certain people. Their opposition to the vaccine is rooted in the assumption that this vaccine as opposed to others is distributed with automatically malevolent intentions and that choosing the vaccine is an act of naive faith that it does not have lasting side effects (which seems to not be the case at all, and no one who receives it is irrational in unless they make assumptions).
It is hardly a surprise that conservatives generally oppose the vaccine because of assumption-based conspiracy theories about everything from hyper-exaggerated tyranny to a supposed plot to reduce the world's population by making the vaccine sterilize people. No one can prove to me that there is some deep state or billionaire cabal to manipulate the global population because by nature, such a conspiracy would be impossible to demonstrate the presence of--if I cannot prove something to myself with pure reason and introspection, it is impossible for other people to prove it to me by appealing to sensory perceptions and intuitions that could be illusions. Conservatives love beliefs based on hearsay because pure reason would shift their focus away from politics and emotions to the necessary truths of logic.
Liberals, on the other hand, are indeed mostly unthinkingly going along with random appeals to authority, but this is exactly what plenty of conservatives are doing, just with regards to different scientists or politicians. Liberals, whether or not they have the right philosophical reasons for doing so, do push back against conservative conspiracy theories--just at the cost of assuming that anyone who does not want the vaccine must be some uncaring, selfish, or stupid person. None of this is true. There are selfish and stupid reasons to reject the vaccine. Any belief that involves assumptions (and even so much as believing that a doctor one is looking at exists outside of one's perceptions is an assumption) is stupid. It is just that liberals only make different assumptions than conservatives! This drives some of them to overlook that some people, without actually believing in conspiracy theories, might just want to wait as long as they can to observe possible side effects in others before they make a medical decision for themselves.
It is hardly a surprise that liberals would think that anything encouraged by the government and scientists must be morally obligatory, infallibly helpful or true, and the only course of belief or action that a rational person would take. Except in the sense of a subjective desire that is made to submit to reason, no one who is rational gives a fuck about deviating from or fitting in with other people's ideas for the sake of doing so. An intelligent person--in other words, a rationalistic person (all other beliefs and attempts to align with reason are selective, random, or accidental at most)--cares about what is both true and provable, and hearsay, almost all sensory perceptions, and consensus are incapable of proving anything more than that hearsay, sensory perceptions, and seeming consensus are there! Just like conservatives, liberals love beliefs based on hearsay because pure reason would shift their focus away from politics and emotions to the necessary truths of logic.
The truth is that conservatives and liberals are just fucking philosophical infants pretending like they have ever had an autonomous, rational, genuinely truth-oriented thought in their life that would not conflict with most of their beliefs. As small of a philosophical issue as the vaccine really is in an ultimate sense, as there are other ways to minimize the spread of the virus and human health is trivial compared to necessary truths anyway, the sheer irrationality and asinine controversies around the COVID-19 vaccine still dominate conversations about politics. Although they might believe or insist otherwise, neither major American party in any way represents rationalism. They are both groups of utter fools who generally seek the power to do whatever they want without true regard for logic, science, or moral obligations.
Logic, people. It is very fucking helpful.
No comments:
Post a Comment