One of the most well written articles I’ve seen so far on Medium! My first degree is in Psychology, and in my estimation everything you said is spot on. Our emotions and preconceptions filter everything and we naturally opt for for reinforcement for cognitive consistency and emotional stability, not cognitive dissonance which leads to a negative emotional state. Nobody want to accept that “everything you know is wrong”.

Steering over more clinical/biological perspective, we can see this in studies of brain chemistry.

If we go zoom out even further to the biological view of humans and animals, as if we were aliens from another planet, or as if we were a planet, we can see that there really is no right or wrong in the universe, and that all life is just organized systems of energy and mass. As a friend of mine posits, we are just sacks of chemicals walking around. How can we call a tiger who attacks a village and eats some kids “bad”? It’s just an organism seeking to survive. Same with murderers, rapists, dictators, genocidists, etc. If you could ask the sun or mars, Hitler was not bad at all, just another sack of chemicals disorganizing other sacks of chemicals, accelerating their decay. It is an indifferent universe in which we live, and we are the only ones to give it meaning which we project from our central nervous system.

But to avoid pain and rapid decomposition, we need to interact with our environment in a way we think helps us survive. As such, our higher order thinking, our constructs of reality must be organized to efficiently do so.

So we filter, insist we’re right, and act accordingly. Uga buga. Just a few million years away from being amoebas.