Complicated thought for today:
I’m listening to a podcast which suggests that the Salem witch trials were triggered by social conflicts, debts, rivalries, etc. The townspeople’s fear and anxiety were weaponized; accusations might be launched as revenge – or in desperation, when the accused turned against their neighbors. Tituba, a slave girl and the first female to be accused, in turn accused many others.
We think of the Salem witch trials as a firestorm of irrational behavior – yet within that cauldron, specific behaviors were absolutely rational. It makes perfect sense to accuse someone else of witchcraft if doing so may save your own life. For Tituba, the chance to accuse others of witchcraft was clearly the only power over others she’d ever have.
There was plenty of tragically fuzzy thinking and hateful religiosity and opportunistic cruelty pushing the whole thing over the cliff, of course. But it might not have happened in a town where wealth, freedom, authority, and emotional satisfaction were evenly distributed.
People aren’t driven to irrational behavior because they’re stupid. They cling to irrational behavior because they are – or they *feel* – powerless.
Religious fanaticism, horoscopes, the occult, nazism, trump – all promise their followers some degree of control over a world they perceive as being out of their control.
To be sure, there are harmless things people do to gain a sense of control, and horrendously evil things people do to gain a sense of control. I don’t think one leads to the other, and I don’t think we need to be equally afraid of them.
It’s easy, and wrong, to think that rationality is the solution.
Rationality can help us untangle the knot, to be sure – but rationality alone will not get us to where we need to go. Any strategy we adopt must reflect natural human behavior, and it’s human nature to seek irrational solutions when rationality alone isn’t paying the bills.
What we often mistake for rationality is: privilege. Any kind of success in life demands the support and alignment of myriad forces beyond our control, yet those who succeed too often believe their success to have resulted from a simple formula, or some short list of essential characteristics. Once they’re convinced they know how it happened, they don’t bother to investigate all the factors they couldn’t see.
Witness: generation after generation of triumphant leaders, entrepreneurs, etc. claiming to have battled every obstacle as they strategized their way to success. Determined to ignore the hidden framework which made their success possible, they offer an explanation that is simple and honest…but not rational.
Of course we need rationality. Our technology is based on it; our progress requires it; our future depends on it.
Yet ultimately it is equality – in the form of justice, opportunity, education, shared risk and shared prosperity – that makes possible the rewards of rationality.
History is jammed with bias, unfairness, injustice, the sediment of every civilization, all maintained by people who were absolutely convinced of their own rationality. Our brains are reasonably good at building small pockets of rationality, but we’re expertly skilled at seeing it when it ain’t there.
Rationality helps us understand the Salem witch trials, but only equality – social, legal, and economic – might have helped us avoid it.