Fundamentalist Antihumanist Personality Disorder

I might expound more fully on "Fundamentalist Antihumanist Personality Disorder" in the future. In the meantime, we have all encountered those who make their attitudes our problem.

I stumbled across an old post about The Need for Absurd Belief Among Fundamentalists on the Breaking Spells blog. It discusses, amongst other things, the fact that fundies are desperate to attack segments of scientific knowledge.

I read it with interest because I am fascinated — and dismayed — by what I regard as the Fundamentalist Cognitive Disorder*. This is often linked to the Fundamentalist Antihumanist Personality Disorder.**

The final line of the post reads:

""Eventually, perhaps, the spell of religion will be broken.""

I decided to convert my response into a post.

Let’s hope! Religion continues to support damaging and outright dangerous cognitive and behavioural disorders.

I completely agree that fundies are terrified of knowledge — whether it’s science or the expert conclusions of unbiased biblical scholars. I also agree that this rigid thinking is the result of childhood indoctrination. Why else would IDiots be fighting to insinuate creationism into secondary science curricula?

I think that the motivation is not merely habit — it is highly emotional. It is also deliberately anti-factual, and, most important, illogical. They are trained into illogic and this fallacious thinking is reinforced by Bible quotes.

Successful religions have set up clever reward and punishment systems. Community is the most mundane motivation, but is probably essential for many. An eternal afterlife with a loving SkyDaddy who punishes one’s enemies is an obvious incentive. The flip side is the prison door. They fear what they are instructed to fear.

However, based on long observation of how some fundies think, I conclude that much of the emotional appeal lies in certainty and the assurance that religious-rule-following renders one RIGHT and morally SUPERIOR. (Excuse the caps. They seemed appropriate.)

It always reminds me of prefects in a school playground. Not a highschool playground. Not a primary school playground in North America. No, a school playground for children up to age 11. That’s the moral level at which these authoritarianism-oriented folk function.

Ugh!

* and ** : not official terminology

* and ** Disclaimer: not all fundies, religionists other than fundies, the occasional atheist.

Duh!

Have you ever noticed that some people refuse to recognize that they are mistaken, or cannot even see where their faulty logic is flawed?

Part of the explanation for this prevalent phenomenon (described in the video) is that we need to understand some threshold amount in order to comprehend that our skills or knowledge are deficient.

Another interesting aspect of Dunning's and Kruger's research is that those individuals who are competent have a tendency to underestimate their comparative level of competence.



Justin Kruger & David Dunning.
Unskilled and unaware of It: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.

Journal of personality and social psychology
1999, vol.77, no.6, pp1121-1134
©1999 by American Psychological Association, Inc.

Liberal plasticity, Conservative rigidity

I have been thinking about right-wing cognition, and have developed a theory based on the fact that the moderately clear dichotomy between conservative and liberal (moral) thinking probably has a fairly simple genetic-developmental explanation. That is, relatively few genes predisposing to one or the other cognitive style.

1. It has been demonstrated that willingness to obey authority is genetically inherited. Such willingness would have conferred a survival value after city states had arisen – disobey at your own peril.

2. It is has also been repeatedly demonstrated that conservatives are more likely to be less educated and to be staunchly religious church-goers.

3. It is also known that the brain is plastic in that it can recover many functions after head injury. However, people do not recover equally well after head injury.

4. Personality disorders are notoriously difficult to treat (modify) and dogmatic thinkers typically fare poorly in talk-therapy. Liberal thinkers fare comparatively well. Some dogmatic thinkers are extreme left-wingers because that was their parents’ political affiliation. However, dogmatic thinkers are more likely to be right-wingers.

5. Conservative church-goers are more likely to exhibit emotional, black-and-white thinking, and to be bigoted. They are more likely to be ESJ than NP. They are notoriously closed-minded and strongly resist reconsidering any of their early beliefs and assumptions. It’s as though they are not even able to modify their early pathways. (This is the reason that right-wingers are fighting to corrupt early school education.) Conservative fundamentalists react very emotionally and personally to any questioning of their beliefs – either by taking offence, or by personal attacks on the questioner.

6. Liberal thinkers tend to move from facts to theory (induction). New facts lead to a logical re-evaluation of theories, particularly for scientists. Conservative thinkers tend to move from emotionally satisfying dogma to distortion of facts.

So, here’s my theory about a genetic predisposition to right-wing thinking. It’s basically a matter of generally lesser brain plasticity. Conservative brains are genetically predisposed to be less able to readjust (be plastic) than are the brains of liberal thinkers. It’s also likely that higher education trains the brain to be more plastic.

It's no accident that mythical Eve's mythical fruit was plucked from the mythical Tree of Knowledge.

I’d be fascinated to see a comparison between cognitive styles in those who recover well or poorly from similar head injuries, or between cognitive styles and other measures of plasticity.