The Selfish Fallacy

and assess the evidence for various political positions and then adopt our ideological outlooks from this process. This is, obviously, utter horseshit; we assemble our political selves either from wanting to embrace a particular social group (all the cool1 people on Twitter pretend they’re part of the Combahee River Collective so I will too) or to reject one (my parents are annoying limousine liberals so I’ll be a college Republican). We then backfill in a set of political opinions from there. There’s a lot of consequences for this, few of them positive. A big one is what I call the Selfish Fallacy, which is neither an apt nor clever name but I can’t think of anything better.

The Selfish Fallacy is where you’ve adopted a political view or set of views out of the previously-mentioned social necessity (or, increasingly, professional survival) but aspects of that view are unpalatable to you for various reasons, so you define the view in a way that is unusual or internally inconsistent or otherwise engineered to avoid conflicting with your other views, social world, or prior commitments. You then act as though that motivated definition is the plain truth about the view or set of views. For example, due to my Harper’s piece I have fairly regularly interacted with people who champion the Nation of Islam as a revolutionary Black power organization. But in fact, as I write in the linked piece, the NOI is first and foremost a bizarre religious cult defined by social conservatism and a truly deranged mythology which has had remarkably little political impact despite its prominence and, at one time, resources. Those people weren’t lying when they represented the NOI the way they did. They genuinely believed that the Nation was some radical liberation organization, rather than a means for Elijah Muhammad to amass money and get access to pliable young women, because doing so helped reconcile various clashing beliefs. The were subject to the Selfish Fallacy, in other words.

Read Full Article »