Man is a rational creature, and a social creature. We tend to think these are distinct  aspects, but in reality they are perfectly continuous. Our reasoning is bound to language, the human means of signaling par excellence. When we walk ourselves through an argument, it is less in order  to persuade ourselves and more to figure out how we would express our conception of the world to others. A reason that cannot be explained to someone else isn’t a reason at  all. We are rational in order to be social, and social in order to be rational.

To the human mind, reliable truth forming processes are just another way of forming group affiliation. The enterprise of science is ultimately a social affair; it is instantiated not by some impersonal method, but by individuals speaking and working together. The “scientific method,” or more accurately those principles deferred to in constructing models of observable phenomena, is just a set of values by which scientists determine whose model best fits the data. Since the ultimate authority of science resides in human beings, science is only as good as its people. In one sense this suggests humans are capable of great intellectual feats, but in another this suggests science is fundamentally fallible. Ignoring the human element, including the multifarious motivations, ideals, and most importantly, group affiliations, is to ignore science as it actually takes place.

As always, the point of bringing up the natural limits of our reason is not to figure out how to work around them, but to determine how they may be brought under our control. Reason is a group effort; it isn’t remotely the product of an individual. Considered holistically, the primary forms of reasoning an individual ever chooses to engage are in those which he has learned from his society, and those forms of reasoning passed on to the individual tend to be those which have survived via the traditional path of evolutionary dialectic. All in all, the individual depends almost completely upon his society to reason, from the words to the forms to the direction. The bit of phenomena that happens between the ears isn’t even half of the totality.

What we find occurring is the constant seeking out of more specific identities and groups in order to confirm (not necessarily in a biased way) one’s picture of the world. The site Buzzfeed plays on this searching for identity in a viral form. “23 Gifs About Our Shared Identity in This Peculiar Cultural Arcana” is titillating primarily because it gives the sense that one is not alone in the universe. I’m not alone, there are enough people who have this in common that I have a tribe. The same dynamic is at play across the spectrum of the explicitly politically affiliated even to the least; from MSNBC and Reddit to Vice and Wikipedia. Wikipedia is perhaps the best example of how ostensibly politically neutral knowledge can be contaminated by implicit ideological bias; even though technically politically neutral (and reliably so for the most part), there lingers that selection of who, what, when, and where particular to the modernist dogmas of Progress and multiculturalism.

The two primary reasons for the community-centric focus of reason are our fundamental dependence upon the group for our individual survival and the tendency of societies to propagate those forms of reason (i.e. tradition) which have proven to confer an adaptive value on their holders. From the cultural artifacts (bowing vs handshaking) to the precepts of civilization (e.g. patriarchy), the individual is less a seeker of truth than he is a justifier of his tribe’s behaviors. Note the tendency of either Republicans or Democrats to defend their politicians and pundits from behavior that in their opponent would be simply inexcusable. The Democrat has a greater latitude for racist opinion, since he can trust on the Democrat-inclined to circle the wagons; likewise, the Republican has a greater latitude for feminist opinion, for the same reason albeit with the Republican-inclined. Politicians are kind of heroes, in the sense that the average individual would deplore the lived knowledge that this person they esteem suffers from all the same foibles as the least of us. Hence the lionization, the abstraction, the deference and construction of knowledge forming processes with crucial verification escape hatches; the purpose was never a reliable knowledge forming process in the first place, but only to be able to cop the lingo, the exosemantic gang signs, from the purely artifactual (e.g. driving a Subaru) to the apparently wise (e.g what gets said on CNN).

This is how weak spots develop in an ideology. Memeplexes develop which suffer from failures to cope with reality; the ability to admit the phenomena and forward an alternative interpretation. See how conservatives scramble at the idea of white privilege. Of course it’s true that whites are privileged, in the sense that individuals tend to hold positive stereotypes of white people. This isn’t, however, due to any sort of illicit or irrational prejudice by whites against non-whites, but precisely for the demonstrated qualities of whites compared to those of other groups. Whites tend to be favored over blacks on the question of criminality, in other words, because blacks are just much more likely to engage in criminal activity. The fostering of this memeplex by leftists is a perfect host for agreeing and amplifying, forwarding the concept of white privilege through the channels of leftism along with the infection of conservative explanation, poisoning the deep recesses of the leftist mind (at least against leftism) and forcing a confrontation with the fact of black criminality.

But white privilege is, of course, only one of many paradigmatically leftist concepts which can be hijacked, retrofitted, and reintroduced into the wild of political discourse with prototypically conservative traits. The corralling of the leftist mind requires only the corralling of the leftist conceits of political orthodoxy.