“Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.”
– Francis Bacon
Although evidence and reality constrain our beliefs, they do not do so completely. For nearly all complex issues, the evidence is fraught with ambiguity and open to alternative interpretation. One way that our desires or preferences serve to resolve these ambiguities in our favour is by keeping our investigative engines running until we uncover information that permits a conclusion that we find comforting.
Human reasoning is flawed, we all know that. Racism, sexism, agism, or any kind of discrimination and inequality are all based on flawed reasoning, false beliefs and invalid arguments. but is the fallibility of human reason all that evil? i believe it depends on circumstances. a lot of times biases and false beliefs indeed do help human adjustment under adverse situations. and infact evidence has been found supporting the notion that being unable to think more favourably about oneself and one’s circumstances than the reality is actually puts one at higher risks of clinical depression. self-serving biases and biased search for confirmatory evidence can help individuals be resilient and/or foster their sense of well-being simply because they make them focus on the positive side and work towards success (of course elements like social support are important too, in this case). if in every thing we do we consider 100% objectively (i mean REALLY objectively – for most of the time when we think we are objective, we’re simply overestimating our objectivity), we probably are not going to have anything accomplished at all because it takes too much time to take all things into account before making a decision to or not to do something.
“When reason fails us, we use experience, which is a weaker and less dignified means. But truth is so great a thing that we must not distain any medium that will lead us to it. Reason has so many shapes that we know not which to lay hold of; experience has no fewer. The inference that we try to draw from the resemblance of events is uncertain, because they are always dissimilar: there is no quality so universal in this aspect of things as diversity and variety.”
-Michel de Montaigne
The evidence required for affirmative answers to the questions “Can I believe this?” and “Must I believe this?” are enormously different. By framing the question in such ways, however, we can often believe what we prefer to believe, and satisfy ourselves that we have an objective basis for doing so.
So it seems that if we are able to achieve the ultimate goal which is [supposedly] good, or at least would not harm others, it doesn’t really matter if our reasoning is flawed in the process of us achieving that goal because biases and flawed reasoning assist us in achieving positive goals in life.
“What ails the truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and often dull. The human mind seeks something more than amusing, and more caressing.”
– H. L. Mencken
