Human Rationality is a Myth

The belief in human rationality began in the Enlightenment. Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Many years ago, I worked as a counsellor on a program that provided support to the families of sex offenders. In practice, that usually meant working with the wives of men convicted of child sexual offences. You might expect that my job would have consisted largely of helping these women work through their shock, horror and grief. That was certainly my expectation when I started working on the program. Yet that was almost never how it went. Instead I invariably found myself dealing with women deep in denial, either refusing to believe the evidence of their husbands’ crimes (the offenders, for their part, frequently continued to protest innocence to their families, even if they had pled guilty in court), or minimising the seriousness of the offences and deflecting blame onto the victims. My job was to dismantle that denial without losing the client — a delicate operation that often felt like trying to reel in a marlin with a cotton thread. The quiet voice of truth could rarely make itself heard over the roaring locomotive of self-deception.

Raised as I was in a family that valued rationality highly and attempted to resolve most disagreements through reasoned argument, my instinct with such clients was to confront them with incontrovertible evidence. Yet I soon learned better: any attempt to force a reckoning with reality merely drove the client out the door. I slowly came to understand that the model provided by my family was fundamentally flawed. Human beings do not construct their mental models of the world based on reason. Rather, we build our picture of reality according to complex emotional and social criteria, where truth frequently only counts to the extent that it forces itself upon us. I believe that my clients knew the truth at some deeper level, but another part of their minds calculated that it was a truth that came with too high a price tag, and did not allow it to penetrate into consciousness.

The idea that people are — at least in potentia — rational in their judgements and decisions, is a legacy of the Enlightenment, the social and intellectual movement that dominated Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. Enlightenment philosophy is still foundational to western society. Thinkers such as John Locke, Immanuel Kant and David Hume attempted to build a new concept of man (I use the word advisedly since women were emphatically not…