Check out www.juancole.com on the parallels between Mao's and Bush's faith-based decisions.
The analysis is chilling and, in effect, points out that whatever the ideological tag on stupidity, it's still stupidity.
I personally think the problem is that we use two different systems for thinking.
One, which psychologists call Experiential, is essentially the emotional part of the brain.
The other, which psychologists call Rational, is the "Vulcan" or Spock part of the brain.
Emotional thinking is good. Evolutionarily, when you heard a lion's roar, you needed immediate action without the intervening analysis. Experiential thinking is the default or survival mode. It's at the level of the unconscious and probably what most of us use most of the time. Especially, when someone says, "I don't feel like doing that. "
To use the Rational part of the brain requires deliberate effort. You don't do math, science or
homework without it. It's slow serial if-then logical reasoning. It's heavy lifting.
Now the big difference is that for Rational reasoning you have to have justification supported by logic and evidence.
But for Experiential Reasoning, the answer is self-evidently valid: "Experiencing is believing" (or, sometimes, perhaps wishing is believing). Good for dealing with lions. Not good for designing computers or nuclear reactors.
If you note the arguments of the Bush administration, you get bogus facts as "evidence" and an ideological agenda as "logic". "Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue." -- François duc de la Rochefoucauld, French epigrammatist (1613-1680).
But to Bush it doesn't matter as long as you unconsciously know the right answer without all that math and analysis (heavy lifting) business.
In fact since it's unconscious, since you just instinctively feel you know the right thing to do, it might even be divine inspiration.
You don't know where it's coming from, but if you feel that somehow you just know what is right, then it must be God talking. God, right? Not some evolutionary inheritance in the way we think. And Bush has said that he thinks "the jury is still out" on evolution, and that evolution and creationism are both viable educational subjects.
Are you scared now?
