One of the problems with listening only to views similar to our own is that we develop big fat blindspots that escape your normal thought process. It’s a pretty rare brain that doesn’t think highly of its own product, so why would it come up with flaws to its own logic. Jonah Lehrer puts it best:
So here’s my new metaphor for human reason: our rational faculty isn’t a scientist – it’s a talk radio host. That voice in your head spewing out eloquent reasons to do this or do that doesn’t actually know what’s going on, and it’s not particularly adept at getting you nearer to reality.
Amongst renegades of the modern GOP and broader conservative movement this has become known as “epistemic closure” and has been bounced around the blogosphere quite a bit over the last year. If you happened to have taken too much philosophy in college, ignore that meaning of the phrase for a moment. The idea, is that the movement has closed itself to information from outside right wing blogs, media, and think tanks. The problem isn’t that they refuse to deal with flaws in their logic, it’s that they never know about them unless someone from the inside comes up with it.
Bruce Bartlett tells a story about being quoted prominently by the New York Times harshly critiquing President Bush. He worried about reaction from conservative colleagues at a large GOP event he was scheduled to attend that week.
After about half an hour I decided to start asking people what they thought of the article. Every single one gave me the same identical answer: I don't read the New York Times. Moreover, the answers were all delivered in a tone that suggested I was either stupid for asking or that I thought they were stupid for thinking they read the Times.
I suppose this shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. After all, the people I was questioning weren't activists from the heartland, but people who worked on Capitol Hill, at federal agencies, in think tanks and so on. They represented the intelligentsia of the conservative movement. Even if they felt they had no need for the information content of the nation's best newspaper, one would have thought they would at least need to know what their enemies were thinking.
I make an attempt to avoid this same problem by listening to bright people no matter how ridiculous I think their perspective is and in this case it comes from a lecture by a Marxist. Bear with me now! (I see you rolling your eyes. Stop that!)
Consider this… when looking for critiques of our Capitalist system, what better place to look than a person who has no interest in defending it? They are intellectually free to consider all the options, examine the issues from a fresh perspective, and make challenging assumptions that can cause those of us vested in our theory to think more clearly and honestly about it.
David Harvey is a professor of Anthropology and social theorists at the Graduate Center of City University of New York. He gave this lecture which has been cleverly animated to keep you interested. What I took from it and the reason I thought worth passing it along, is this unresolved problem we have with the power of our finance industry and the oversized personal profits it’s able to extract from our system. Rather than helping and supporting our capitalist system, they’re doing it considerable harm. The recently passed Financial Regulation (FinReg) bill does little to change that fact.
I think our country’s failure to do so is one of these blindspots that our collective belief in capitalism has created. The result could be disastrous without response. But how can we reign in the gambling that Wall Street does with our money without first reigning in the outsized influence they have on our lawmakers through their massive campaign contributions?
