“Just like when we coerce our children or other adults they react badly and seem to become more intransigent, the same is true of ideas in our own mind. Fighting yourself is a battle you can’t win.”
– Sarah Fitz-Claridge
(In answer to the question I was asked recently, of why I now do not necessarily mention antirational memes, the answer is that when I do talk about antirational memes parents often conclude that taking children seriously is impossible, and lose hope.)
“If antirational memes mess with your critical faculties, how can you ever overcome them? Don’t you need to be able to criticise them to abandon them?”
“How can I overcome the antirational memes disabling my creativity, with my disabled creativity?!”
See also:
“What is a ‘meme’—‘antirational’ or otherwise?!”
“If antirational memes are compelling me to coerce my children, what hope is there?!”
Good question! If antirational memes cause their holders to behave in ways that cause their children and others to adopt the antirational memes and those memes have the property that they as it were fight attempts to criticise and drop them, how can they ever be dropped?!
I think the word “disabled” is too immutable-sounding and unduly pessimistic. Although David Deutsch has occasionally used that word, he stresses that we can overcome some of them using our creativity, through conjecture, criticism and seeking good explanations, just like we create any other knowledge. You abandon antirational memes by understanding what is happening, and creatively solving the problems they cause.
Does that mean approaching such antirational parts of your mind with a coercive, infallibilist, brook-no-dissent spirit of “How dare you exist, you wicked, shameful part! I am going to force you to listen to my manifestly true fatal arguments, override you, overcome you, and abandon you. And don’t even think about complaining to me that I am being coercive! I’ll show you coercive! You deserve to be annihilated! You are evil!”?
No. Adding coercion even within our own mind has unintended deleterious consequences. What happens when you try to override an idea in your mind coercively rather than using reason is that the conflict is entrenched, or the area of entrenchment widened. Just like when we coerce our children or other adults they react badly and seem to become more intransigent, the same is true of ideas in your own mind. Fighting yourself is a battle you can’t win.
The trouble is that antirational memes being what they are, even if, instead of coercively fighting them to overcome and annihilate them, you are trying to abandon them using reason by refuting them through rational argument, logically, you are threatening their existence, so they resist, dig in, hide and fight. However rational and reasonable our straightforward explicit conscious arguments against them are, they experience our criticism as coercive—as an existential threat.
So I think we have to be emotionally-intelligent in our dealings with these antirational parts of our mind, meeting them where they are, at their own problem situation, seeing how it feels for them from their perspective, rather than just barging in with the critical arguments that seem so rational and unanswerable to us from our (or another part of our mind’s) perspective.
One way of doing this in practice is using Internal Family Systems (IFS). When you notice such an antirational entrenched conflict in your mind (and unfortunately, you might not), you can go inside your mind IFS-style, and from the lovingkindness and inner wisdom of your emotionally-intelligent, calm, clear, compassionate, confident, connected, creative core Self, you can have a nice conversation with that part or those parts locked in entrenched conflict, and gently and noncoercively help the parts involved to relax deeply, leaving you free to move forward.
For more details about what I mean by this, and how to do it, see: “How can I drop the antirational part of my mind that interferes with me taking my children seriously?”
See also:
- The rationalist mistake
- Risking coercion due to conflict-aversion
- Coercion, manipulation, reason, persuasion
Sarah Fitz-Claridge, 2022, Taking Children Seriously FAQ: ‘“How can I overcome the antirational memes disabling my creativity, with my disabled creativity?”’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/how-can-i-overcome-the-antirational-memes-disabling-my-creativity-with-my-disabled-creativity/