Exploring the connection to politics a bit more, Coherence Therapy: Practice Manual And Training Guide has this page where it claims that emotional learning forms our basic assumptions for a wide variety of domains, including ones that we would commonly think of as being the domains of rationality:
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Unconscious constructs constituting people’s pro-symptom positions tend to be constructs that define these areas of personal reality and felt meaning:
The essential nature of self/others/world (ontology/identity)
The necessary direction or state of affairs to pursue (purpose, teleology)
What necessarily results in what (causality)
How to be connected with others; how attachment works (attachment/boundaries)
How self-expression operates (identity/selfhood/boundaries/creativity)
Where to place responsibility and blame (causality, morality)
What is good and what is bad; what is wellness and what is harm; what is safety and what is danger (safety/values/morality)
How knowing works; how to know something (epistemology)
The way power operates between people (power/autonomy/dominance/survival)
What I am owed or what I owe (justice/accountability/duty/loyalty/entitlement)
Examples (verbalizations of unconscious, nonverbal constructs/schemas held in the limbic system and body)
Ontology: “People are attackers. If they see me, they’ll try to kill me.” Causality: “If too much is going well for me, that will make a big blow happen to me.” Purpose: “I’ve got to keep Dad from withdrawing his love from by never, ever disagreeing with him.” Attachment: “I’ll get attention and connection only if I’m visibly unwell, failing, hurting.” “You’ll reject and disconnect from me if I differ from you in any way.” Values: “It is selfish and bad to pay attention to my own feelings, needs and views; it is unselfish and good to be what others want me to be.” Power: “The one who has the power in a personal relationship is the one who withdraws love; the other is the powerless one.”
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It seems pretty easy to take some of those examples and see how they, or something like them, could form the basis of ideologies. E.g. “people are attackers” could drive support for authoritarian policing and hawkish military policy, with elaborate intellectual structures being developed to support those conclusions. On the other side, “people are intrinsically good and trustworthy” could contribute support to opposite kinds of policies. (Just to be clear, I’m not taking a position on which one of those policies is better nor saying that they are equally good, just noting that there are emotional justifications which could drive support for either one.)
That might be one of the reasons why you don’t see “I know that X is correct, but can’t bring myself to support it” in politics so much. For things like “will you be hated if you speak up”, there’s much more of a consensus position; most people accept on an intellectual level that speaking up doesn’t make people hated, because there’s no big narrative saying the opposite. But for political issues, people have developed narratives to support all kinds of positions. In that case, if you have a felt position which feels true, you can often find a well-developed intellectual argument which has been produced by other people with the same felt position, so it resonates strongly with your intuitions and tells you that they are right.
This could also be related to the well-known thing where people in cities tend to become more liberal: different living conditions give rise to different kinds of implicit learning, changing the kinds of ideologies that feel plausible.
Exploring the connection to politics a bit more, Coherence Therapy: Practice Manual And Training Guide has this page where it claims that emotional learning forms our basic assumptions for a wide variety of domains, including ones that we would commonly think of as being the domains of rationality:
---
Unconscious constructs constituting people’s pro-symptom positions tend to be constructs that define these areas of personal reality and felt meaning:
The essential nature of self/others/world (ontology/identity)
The necessary direction or state of affairs to pursue (purpose, teleology)
What necessarily results in what (causality)
How to be connected with others; how attachment works (attachment/boundaries)
How self-expression operates (identity/selfhood/boundaries/creativity)
Where to place responsibility and blame (causality, morality)
What is good and what is bad; what is wellness and what is harm; what is safety and what is danger (safety/values/morality)
How knowing works; how to know something (epistemology)
The way power operates between people (power/autonomy/dominance/survival)
What I am owed or what I owe (justice/accountability/duty/loyalty/entitlement)
Examples (verbalizations of unconscious, nonverbal constructs/schemas held in the limbic system and body)
Ontology: “People are attackers. If they see me, they’ll try to kill me.”
Causality: “If too much is going well for me, that will make a big blow happen to me.”
Purpose: “I’ve got to keep Dad from withdrawing his love from by never, ever disagreeing with him.”
Attachment: “I’ll get attention and connection only if I’m visibly unwell, failing, hurting.” “You’ll reject and disconnect from me if I differ from you in any way.”
Values: “It is selfish and bad to pay attention to my own feelings, needs and views; it is unselfish and good to be what others want me to be.”
Power: “The one who has the power in a personal relationship is the one who withdraws love; the other is the powerless one.”
---
It seems pretty easy to take some of those examples and see how they, or something like them, could form the basis of ideologies. E.g. “people are attackers” could drive support for authoritarian policing and hawkish military policy, with elaborate intellectual structures being developed to support those conclusions. On the other side, “people are intrinsically good and trustworthy” could contribute support to opposite kinds of policies. (Just to be clear, I’m not taking a position on which one of those policies is better nor saying that they are equally good, just noting that there are emotional justifications which could drive support for either one.)
That might be one of the reasons why you don’t see “I know that X is correct, but can’t bring myself to support it” in politics so much. For things like “will you be hated if you speak up”, there’s much more of a consensus position; most people accept on an intellectual level that speaking up doesn’t make people hated, because there’s no big narrative saying the opposite. But for political issues, people have developed narratives to support all kinds of positions. In that case, if you have a felt position which feels true, you can often find a well-developed intellectual argument which has been produced by other people with the same felt position, so it resonates strongly with your intuitions and tells you that they are right.
This could also be related to the well-known thing where people in cities tend to become more liberal: different living conditions give rise to different kinds of implicit learning, changing the kinds of ideologies that feel plausible.