From Humanoid Faults to Manipulated Consensus, 18

Bias by fixation is just like being hypnotized: one gets warned of the cliff ahead, one thanks as if one had listened, and then one stoutly walks over its brink and plummets as if one hadn’t even heard. This proves that one is either hypocritical or not there in control of self, or both; plain and simple fact.
It’s commonplace how we obey our inner fixations first, and only then we take actual circumstances into account, but only as much as they fit our fixations.
One can also be defensive of one’s hypnotic state, and resent the attempts to make one aware of it.
Irrationality is not just a merely passive state: it actively defends itself. At the expense of the subject. And of us all.
And the valley floors of our inner selves, from where we look at the core of existence, of ourselves, of our fellows, of life and the world, are dangerously scattered with the gruesome scrapyards with heaps of plummeted people who couldn’t overcome their fixations, and of our hopes we put in them that they could. Besides loneliness, scrapyards as dangerous and polluting as the loss of hope can be.

Bias by sheer inertia is a shame like that of a life raft needing the same distance of an oil tanker to change direction or come to a halt. Our intelligence is not a material fact, it’s not bound by physical laws like that of inertia, yet we behave as if it was – which is a shame and a betrayal. Despite having apparently observed, compared, duly pondered and genuinely made up one’s mind in favour of a better course of action or state of things, one in actual fact continues the course or the state one decided to quit, so indefinitely to let others have grounds to fear the change is going to be brought about too late – if ever. A bit like those barbaric public bodies or officials that persist in misdemeanour after it was duly acknowledged and even sanctioned as such. So people feel just like the oil tanker crew, watching the lighthouse that continues to approach while hoping the captain did not give the order to change direction too late, and even wondering whether he gave it at all, when the delay gets so bad, given the circumstances, that it becomes indiscernible from inaction.

From Humanoid Faults to Manipulated Consensus