Saturday, July 9, 2011

Natural Egocentric Dispositions

Nine ways our natural egocentricity (the tendency to think of ourselves as central) steers us wrong. Several are surprising and revealing.

I've loved this sort of thing from an early age. At age nine, I began noticing that everyone, without exception, was nuts, and developed a fascination with spotting fallacy and delusion. I tried, for a few decades, to singlehandedly correct the problem...with disappointing (not to mention unappreciative) results. Then I began observing my own irrationalities, a more fruitful pursuit (unavoidably involving increasing interest in the unconscious).

Not that it's necessary to be a rigorously logical Spock. Sometimes I revel in irrationality, if only to spice things up. And, anyway, the more I observe my own thinking, the more inspired I am to think less, generally, as sanity is found in flow, not cogitation. But I see myself as having been placed on an inexplicable planet where inexplicable things happen, with a vague sense that we all have everything quite wrong. So it's a no-brainer (heh) that I'd seek to identify and remove layers of delusion.

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