Quote of the Day: Sacredness and Motivated Ignorance

'The fundamental rule of political analysis from the point of psychology is, follow the sacredness, and around it is a ring of motivated ignorance.'

Jonathan Haidt

Comments

[M. Möhling]

I found it here a month ago, and now the right-wing bloggosphere is all abuzz about Mr Haidt--who isn't much of a liberal himself, btw. Of course George Orwell had something to say already about "motivated ignorance" aka "protective stupidity," a force that is strong with the idiot boys we choose to belittle. Another quickie:

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.
glpiggy.net

What's funny is that we assume this to apply to our feeble foes more than to ourselves, don't we?