The Four Horsemen of Delusion and the Psychosis of Oughtism

In my never-ending struggle to understand the left, I stumbled upon another helpful way of interpreting their misinterpretation of reality. It's in Dutton's The Naked Classroom, where he calls it "the psychosis of oughtism," something we've touched on in the past.

That is to say, there is is and there is ought, and one ought not -- actually, must not -- conflate them, for doing so leads to absurdity in one form or another. But at the same time, we must respect the fact that the ought is, only on a higher plane than the isness of material science.  

As we've discussed in the past, man qua man lives in contact with the transcendent Ought, which is to say, conscience. Some people try to reduce the transcendent Ought to the immanent Is, but they are, of course, asses. Again, mustn't do that.

Is oughtism literally a psychosis? In order to answer this question I'd have to don my psychologist's hat, and I forget where I put it. Certainly it is a kind of cultural or collective delusion. For example, if you and everyone you know is a cannibal, is that wrong? Is that frowned upon here?

I don't even own a historian's hat, but a quick rundown of History reveals an endless history of similar delusions, so one must be cautious in assuming one is somehow free of these mind parasites and collective viruses that attach themselves to the human subject. Suffice it to say,

History shows that man's good ideas are accidental and his mistakes methodical.

And that

Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God and another who believes he is a god. 

For which reason it is always best to start with what we don't know -- with a kind of Socratic skepticism or learned ignorance or even apophatic theology. 

Dutton refers to the Four Horsemen of Delusion, which include 1) Low Decoupling Ability, 2) Motivated Social Cognition, 3) Concept Creep, and 4) Catastrophization. We've probably discussed these concepts in different terms, but let's stick with Dutton's analysis.

First, decoupling 

refers to the ability to distinguish descriptions of what is or what might be (science) from what should be (philosophy, ethics, and policy).

Right there I must respectfully disagree, because for the Raccoon, philosophy trumps science in the Is department: indeed, 

Without philosophy, the sciences do not know what they know.

We could cite many more aphorisms along these lines, but they all go to the ineradicability of the transcendent, or to "meta-science." Thus, 

Properly speaking, the social sciences are not inexact sciences, but sciences of the inexact.

Nevertheless,  

“Irrationalist” is shouted at the reason that does not keep quiet about the vices of rationalism.

 But

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician’s rule book.

Which is why we have no issue with the science of evolutionary psychology (Dutton's racket) so long as it doesn't pretend to exhaust the mystery of man (let alone God), for when it does so it essentially reduces to its own form of magical Oughtism. 

Or in other words, never immanentize the eschaton. Rather, respect the Tension (between immanence and transcendence). 

As we know, ideology in all its forms represents a failure to Respect the Tension, precisely. As Dutton rightly points out, "ideology warp's people's ability to think logically," to which I would add trans-logically. For example, 

If good and evil, ugliness and beauty, are not the substance of things, science is reduced to a brief statement: what is, is. 

Now, we agree that what is, is. But that is hardly the end of it, rather, only the beginning, for there are different levels of isness, starting from quantifiable matter below, to math and logic in between, to metaphysics above, AKA the three levels of abstraction. The latter (the third level) goes to the very principles of reality which entail the lower ones.

However, even on its own terms, research shows that people struggle to be logically consistent. That is, they are "just not able to assess basic logic accurately," often because "ideology impair[s] their reasoning; they [are] low decouplers."

To this I would only add that it is also necessary to decouple what applies to one level from what is true of a higher level, something which Dutton does not address. 

In any event, people with low decoupling ability are often the victims of Motivated Social Cognition, which is 

the idea that people's beliefs are, in part, adopted because they satisfy some psychological needs.

Which is really just another way of saying wishful thinking, and truly truly, if wishes were horses, progressives would ride. 

Concept Creep goes to 

the observation that many more things are described as harmful or violent today than was once the case, reflecting an increasingly liberal moral agenda, in which you competitively signal your liberalism, and supposed sensitivity, by finding more and more things "harmful." 

This accounts for the gradual and then all of a sudden creep from mere political correctness to full blown wokeness in the space of a generation or less, which has led to the Catastrophization of everything from the weather, to the impending death of Our Democracy™, to the 1,000 year Reich of the Orange Man. In brief, 

The Four Horsemen of Delusion have created a psychosis of oughtism. Oughtists are incapable of accepting a scientific statement when it conflicts with their worldview.

But they are also incapable of accepting philosophical statements when they so conflict, for example, the principles of non-contradiction (e.g., a man is a man and therefore not a woman), of the intelligibility of being (the opposite of which is postmodernism), and of sufficient reason (evolutionary psychology itself being insufficient to account for the phenomenon of man).

So, where does this leave us? It leaves us with the choice of ending the post here or of veering into a whole new subject, which I suppose has to do with decoupling the lower isness of science from the higher isness of perennial metaphysical truth. We choose to end the post.