From Humanoid Faults to Manipulated Consensus, 19

Emotional inertia is a facet worth mentioning in and of itself: here being associative and being inertial merge into our transferring our emotional reactions from the culprit to the innocent. Our support for the victims of wrongs, and our gratitude towards the heroes who denounce them, takes the form of treating them as if they were the culprits. Notice the use of the term re−action: someone or something else incites our emotions, and we are effect of that someone or something and of our emotional ardour. And once the spring is loaded, here we go: whoever and whatever within our arm’s reach in the wake of that ardour is doomed.

We’re “reasonable” – in the sense underlined by the quotes surrounding it:

It's worth recalling that the verb “to justify” means “to make something right”, and then pointing out that if something needs to be “made” right, this means it is not at all right in the first place. And we favour justification over the raw acknowledgement of crookedness: we see something wrong and, first, we instantly focus on the reasons why its being crooked is justified, and then, second, we are perfectly willing to settle with the provided reasons why it can’t be straightened – thus carefully avoiding the premise that could enable us to straighten it: plainly acknowledging that something wrong is something wrong and that's it. Part of this is we’re unwilling to confront wherever we may stand some improvement: too hard to really look at ourselves in the mirror and admit our weak spots.
And if we lead “reasonable” lives, soon we find ourselves strangled by a jungle of crooked things, and still incapable to realize how serious the situation is, and how big is our share in the responsibility for it. This “reasonableness” in quotes is a form of blindness, a subtle one in that the blind does not realize being blind. Or, rather, a more peculiar than subtle form to the degree one claims to see very well to hide from self as much as from others one’s intention to be blind.

From Humanoid Faults to Manipulated Consensus