Rationalization

If you believe that the Shaman’s actions do not warrant a year in solitary and 41 additional months in the pokey, you are saying everything was peaceful and rioting in the Capitol is no big deal.

If you notice, Democrats are doing the same thing with J6 that they do with everything. They created an argument that nobody is making to make it appear they are winning.

Nobody on the right believes that J6 wasn't a riot and that breaking things and attacking police is acceptable. I know it is a small sample, but pretty much every one I know wish the riot part of J6 had never happened, mostly because it gave the Democrats the narrative they wanted (and for all appearances, helped create).

What we are saying is that people who are being charged for just walking through the Capitol complex and weren't part of the violence should not be treated as if they were an invading force.

But the Democrats say if you want that, you deny the violence that did happen.

It is just the reverse for the BLM "protests". I never lumped protesters in with the looters, but if you opposed the looters, arsonists, and rioters in the BLM events, you are a racist who hates black people.

BLM protests were “fiery, but mostly peaceful”, J6 was mostly peaceful but the end of civilization as we know it.

It is just rationalization.

Specific to general and general to specific depending on whose ox is gored.

The aspect of contemporary progressives that frustrates me the most is their penchant for rationalizing. Rationalization is a funny word because it has meanings that are diametrically opposed.

You have likely heard and intuitively know the meaning of the term "sour grapes" - but like me, never thought about from whence it originated. I did a little research and found that the phrase "sour grapes" derives from one of the fables attributed to Aesop called "The Fox and the Grapes" that goes like this:

"One hot summer's day a fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch. ‘Just the thing to quench my thirst,' quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the branch. Turning round with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in their air, saying: ‘I am sure they are sour.'”

Let's break that story into a syllogism based on the fox's thought process:

• I am an agile and nimble fox,

• I can't reach the grapes on the branch,

• Therefore, the grapes must be sour.

The fox used rationalization as a defense mechanism to explain that his failure had nothing whatsoever to do with him. He is essentially using rationalization to deny reality.

That is not only rationalization, it is also cognitive dissonance. The fox knows he wants the grapes but in contradiction to everything he observes that tells him the grapes are ripe and tasty, he convinces himself that he doesn't want them, not because he knows the grapes are sour but because he just can't reach them. That is also something called a non sequitur, because whether he can reach them or not has nothing to do with the condition of the grapes.

In sociology, rationalization is the replacement of traditions, values, and emotions as motivators for behavior in society with concepts based on rationality and reason.

In economics, business and even the military, rationalization is the process of allocating resources in a logical fashion to maximize efficiency or outcomes.

But in psychology, rationalization is an attempt to logically justify immoral, deviant, or generally unacceptable behavior. In Freud’s classic psychoanalytic theory, rationalization is a defense mechanism, an unconscious attempt to avoid addressing the underlying reasons for a behavior. It is an attempt to make the intolerable consciously tolerable - and often an attempt to make the intolerable seem admirable and superior.

When critically examining contemporary progressivism, one can discard the first two and focus on the third - and that is not an opinion, that focus is demanded by their own words and deeds.

1. Progressives live by reverse logic. Rather than operating on a logical basis that says "because these things are correct, therefore I am correct", they opt for the approach of "because I am correct; therefore, things with which I agree must also be correct."

2. Progressives will never find, nor can they see or accept, any evidence that contradicts their positions, because they simply reject any evidence that does not fit their standards, the problem being their standards are determined solely by what fits their narrative. The corollary to the premise above would be "because I am correct and things with which I agree must be correct; therefore, all other things must be incorrect.

The Fox’s syllogism is alive and well on the American left. It goes something like this:

• People of the left are always righteous and morally correct,

• I am person of the left,

• Therefore, everybody who disagrees with me is wrong.

One cannot just simply awake one fine morning and decide to call a tree a car and expect to be taken seriously - or even to communicate with others.

And yet it happens every day on the American left.