Are we really so different from Trump supporters?

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There is a real possibility that Donald Trump will win the upcoming presidential election – adding four more years of toxic chaos for  the world.

It’s understandable that I and many others want to stand apart from the supporters of Donald Trump – we find it inexplicable and intolerable that anyone could vote for such a demonstrably incompetent and narcissistic ‘leader’.

But once you take away the particulars, how different are our methods of forming beliefs? We may come to different conclusions, but how solid and well-informed are our opinions? How much scrutiny do we put our deeply cherished values under? How open are we to being challenged and criticised? Do we welcome criticism so that we can form better and more informed opinions? 

It’s worth thinking about this for a moment if we wish to be people who hold considered and thought-through opinions.

I’m not going to say that all opinions are equally questionable, rather that we should be continually reviewing our beliefs and values: asking how we formed them and whether they’re still a rational platform for an examined and moral life.

Challenging and perhaps updating our beliefs is not a sign of personal failure or an indication that we were wrong to hold them. It’s just an acknowledgement that we and the world around us changes – and so we have new information to work with. But this is hard work and mainstream educational practices rarely train people in methods and frameworks  of disciplined thinking. Too often school prepares people for lives of utility and obedience – not critical thought.

Society often delivers much more encouragement to believe that our subjective feelings are the best guide to moral questions. With the relative decline of moral codes based around claims of transcendent knowledge (like religion) what do we now base our morality around? Too often we are thrown back on ourselves, but with little training in how to think rationally. In this scenario, our feelings are simpler and much more accessible than any pause for thought.

If something feels ‘right’ to us, the temptation is to ‘go with it’, precisely because further thought might throw up big holes in our logic and reveal the limits of our understanding.

A big problem with our values being ‘feelings’-based is that we are naturally going to seek those experiences which give us certain feelings: for most of us, comfort and security will be at the top. Similarly, we are more likely to listen to those whose opinions make us feel good. Feelings have no moral value and are not reliable indicators of whether our beliefs or the actions arising from them are just.

So we make our lonely way through a savagely divided world, where many shout – but few listen. No wonder we seek others who feel as we do: that way we feel less alone and ‘vindicated’ in our beliefs. Since many avoid the discomfort of divergent opinions, our society lacks any shared dialectic frameworks in which we might assess and refine our beliefs. 

We may have an unsettled feeling that the values we live by are to some degree unjust or immoral, but many (most?) of us have no way to examine them outside of our felt sense.

Question: Why are subjective feelings such bad sources of information when we’re forming opinions?

Answer: Feelings are not rational and are often based on underlying thoughts that we may not choose to examine.

Have you ever caught yourself feeling upset or angry and asked yourself what you were thinking when that emotion arose? It’s very illuminating.

This is not to say that emotions are not important. They are integral to our ability to think rationally, but they are raw material. The word rational has come to mean a dry intellectual process, detached from emotion but this was not its original meaning. Rationality refers to our innate ability to take in data (including our emotions and sense experiences), evaluate and integrate it and form conceptions.These concepts are then fed back in as data, in an ongoing process of reaching an ever more comprehensive grasp of a concept.

We need ongoing external information to do this, as well as internal data – and the information that will serve us best is likely to be that which gives us an angle we hadn’t considered. So, instead of seeking the views of those who agree with us, we are better served by our opponents [if they are prepared to engage ingenuously in a search for the truth – Ed.] uncomfortable though those this notion may be.

Our rationality is what defines us as human beings. If we use it well, we are functioning to our capacity. If we boast of being ‘more evolved’ than Trump supporters, it might be worth asking ourselves if we are actually more rational than them.

The answer may be more complex than we want to hear…

Emma Karran