Left and Right Thinking is About Politics, Not Brains
[Partisan cognitive distortions and their consequences. Episode 1]
Living in the U.S. as a half-outsider, I came to believe that deep down, the Left and the Right want the same things, but think in devastatingly and systematically different ways. In this post I outline what these differences are; in the follow-ups I will cover specific examples in depth.
Why does it matter? I spoke with many intelligent and well-meaning people on both sides and it pains me how much they hate each other despite having so much in common. It also pains me how often good solutions are overlooked because of hate-fueled blindness. If this country is ever to heal, we need to start by understanding the conflict, understanding how the other side thinks and feels. So here we go…
I’ll use gun control as an example. All Americans want to live in a safe society, with children at school, concert-goers in open gatherings, and regular people at home all feeling safe and protected. [PSA: If you doubt that voters across the isle want that — you’ve been completely brainwashed. Seriously, stop watching MSNBC, Fox News, or whatever mainstream or social media you are consuming ASAP.] However, the chosen path to that bright future is “fewer guns” by the left and “more guns" by the right. How is this possible? Is half the country stupid and wrong?
Believe it or not, neither approach is flawed beyond repair, but we’ll talk about it in other posts. For now, I want to show how this reflects a cognitive divide between the Left and the Right. Here is my blatantly over-generalized theory:
The Left typically engages in First-Order Thinking (focusing on the immediate problem).
The right is more subtle. On many problems, they aim to engage in Second-Order thinking (considering long-term consequences). But sometimes it leads to analysis paralysis and they end up “Zero-order thinking” instead (ignoring the problem & hoping it’d go away).
Now let’s see how this theory applies to gun control.
Gun control logic on the left:
The Left’s logic is immediate (first-order): guns are involved in shootings => if we remove all guns, there will be no shootings => success. It seems so obvious that many are genuinely startled how could anyone “not get it.” Here is (one of many) second-order consequences such logic overlooks:
By removing guns, we make the old and feeble more vulnerable. When a criminal knows that a grandpa living alone has nothing better to protect himself than a kitchen knife and a baseball bat, the criminal will break in much more eagerly compared to when there is even a tiny chance that our grandpa has a shotgun.
Now, here is a million-dollar title for a right-wing youtube channel: “the Left Want Your Grandpa DEAD!” (make sure to credit me \s). Does anyone on the left really want more dead grandpas? Of course not. They haven’t thought about it this way. Such lapses in judgment come from wanting change “here and now,” and the generally optimistic view of human nature.
Many democrats, until they experience criminal behavior on themselves, can’t fathom that anyone could be so callous, opportunistic, and absolutely awful. But that’s how a criminal mind works: running a brutal risk-reward calculus and looking for easy targets.
If you think democrat voters overlook such things by malice a) again, stop watching Fox News b) sometime I’ll share my collection of highly intelligent democrats getting surprised by how their do-gooder policies can be abused. Some people just don’t think in this criminal/callous way. Perhaps you need to be a little dead inside before proposing any pro-social policies. But if you’re dead inside, where to find energy for change?
Gun control logic on the right:
Speaking of the dead inside, let's now discuss the conservatives (just kidding, just kidding). But honestly, here I am, a self-proclaimed neutral observer, digging at the Left. Is the Right just better at… thinking? Well, no. As I mentioned, their second-third-n-th order reasoning often leads to resistance to any change whatsoever.
This is how it might unfold: guns are involved in shootings => perhaps it might be reasonable to run background checks to make it harder, though not impossible, for mentally ill people and criminals to obtain a gun => background checks might lead to total governmental control over who owns a gun => if sometime in the future the U.S. government becomes tyrannical, people won’t have any means to fight back => we might end up like north Korea, and it sounds worse than the shootings we have now, as bad as they are => maybe it’s better not to tamper with what the Founding Fathers intended => avoid background checks => success (shootings remain, but a worse disaster averted).
So as a result, their universal and only solution to mass shootings is to keep things as they are, arm yourself, and hope to be a better shot than “the bad guy.”
So who is right?
Neither Left nor Right thinking is always “proper” or “correct”; both have their (mis)uses. So far, I’ve only laid down the framework. In future posts, I’ll dive deeper into specific problems and discuss a) how the Left and the Right repeatedly follow the thinking patterns I outlined b) concrete consequences of these thinking patterns c) my own views on what should be done.