IMO, an idea that should be more widely spread – not even widely assented to, necessarily, just talked about, possibly as a “controversial thing” – is that contrarianism is often the result of anxiety
More precisely, not contrarianism but “I know what you’re thinking, but – what if this consensus idea were actually wrong?”-ism
In stereotype land, the psychology behind this behavior is either a desire to annoy people from a place of presumed intellectual superiority, or just an interest in intellectual game-playing for its own sake. But in my experience, I find myself wanting to question consensuses because the alternative feels scary. If no one really knows why the thing is true and everyone just believes it because other people believe it in a self-confirming web, then what happens when it turns out to be wrong?
The anxiety, in particular, makes this weigh on me in particular even though, as just described, it would be a society-wide failure. I tend to (irrationally) feel like other people can rely on “what seems sensible” without much risk, possibly due (says the anxiety) to some mystical intuitive faculty that aligns their sense of “what seems sensible” with actual truth – but if I try to do that, I end up ruining everything, and then everyone’s looking at me in horror and pain and asking what the hell I thought I was doing, and I’m thinking “well it seemed sensible at the time” but that is not enough, not for me, no, for me only rock-solid nerdy professorial foundations will work, not because I want to be an intellectual, but because I want to not ruin everything
(This almost never actually happens, and when it does it doesn’t happen with anything like the high drama in the previous paragraph, but it feels like it is a danger I must ever be on watch for)
And when I look around me – taking into account of course that I may be projecting my own motivations onto others (I must include nerdy caveats like that one, some people might know how to get by without them but I don’t, you see how it is) – well, it looks to me like a lot of the “contrarians” and “fans of weird ideas” out there have anxiety disorders. And this makes sense.
Rejecting common knowledge and laboriously replacing it with a nerdy fiddly ground-up programme that either ends up rediscovering the obvious or “absurdly” negating it – this can be intellectual pretentiousness, or a desire to be special, or just poor judgment of how to usefully spend one’s time and energy. But it can also be what you do because you “know” that if your foundations aren’t rock-solid, they’re going to blow up in your face and also the faces of loved ones and innocent bystanders, even if this never happens to anyone else
If you don’t go back and check whether the oven is on, it’s going to turn out that it was on, because this is how your life works. If you don’t neurotically plan out your schedules and your schedules-within-schedules and make checklists and proceed in life one carefully regimented step at a time, you are going to make some mistake so stupid that it lies outside of the realm of ordinarily conceivable human behavior, and it will be so embarrassing that you will be cast out from society and gainful employment forever, because this is how your life works.
If you don’t worry over the coherence of your epistemology and your ethics and the reliability of every source you read and the myriad potential for error even in the work of the great scholars and thinkers who have shaped the received wisdom of educated people and the established (established? by whom?) fact that received wisdom in every prior society has contained vast errors and licensed vast injustices and in sum the ever-present possibility that everyone else could just be getting some basic thing (any basic thing) wrong and failing to see reality for what it is,
it is interesting to frame this as “an anxiety disorder” because previously I had framed it as “everyone else is INSANE and SOMEHOW MANAGES TO NOT FREAK OUT ABOUT THE UNRELIABILITY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE because as previously mentioned they are INSANE”
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bendini1 reblogged this from nostalgebraist and added:Framing contrarianism as a personality trait that comes from a place of modesty (anxiety) rather than superiority might...
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Well, but I’m not looking for a full theory of contrarianism, or for an ideal one-question quick diagnostic for anxiety....
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