What makes a thought ‘extreme’?

A majority of the population in my country of residence would likely consider me an extremist, in a certain sense of the word. That’s not a jab at the political situation in the United Kingdom, this would very likely be true in my home country of Norway as well.

I don’t mean to say that I’m an extremist in the sense of some kind of violent insurrectionist. I am certainly not that. No, I mean in the narrower sense of “expresses and advocates for thoughts and ideas that the average person would consider outside the bounds of what is reasonable”.

What is it that makes a thought or an idea fall outside those bounds? How are those bounds set? We know that such boundaries are rarely static, that they move as societies do. Consider such things as the death penalty, or child labour; both concepts that have gone from expected to abhorrent across much of the world in a relatively short amount of time.

Clearly, then, once such taboos have been broken, what was previously obvious may quickly find itself seen as obviously wrong.

Earlier today I had a discussion with a new arrival to one of my social groups. This is a group wherein certain such ideas are very much the norm. This particular discussion was notable because the new arrival could not even conceptualize where some of these ideas could possibly come from until we had come quite far into the discussion. As obvious as it seemed to me and my friends, it seemed equally obvious to the newcomer that this couldn’t possibly be a workable idea. Put plainly, they considered the mere thought of it outright absurd.

Regardless of which view was true, there was a chasm between what we thought of as the Obvious, and I want to know how that can happen.

Between the Obvious and the True

I used to be a teacher, and I have a broad background in linguistics, pedagogy, and behavioural science (a field that provides much insight, even if you reject its central premises as I do). My background has given me a particular interest in the cognitive aspects of learning, and especially in how our brains incorporate new information with ‘old’ (existing) knowledge.

In large part because of what I have learned about these things, for a long time I have been highly suspicious of the concept of the Obvious. One of the main principles I try to live by is the idea that everything should be questioned. What our brains consider ‘obvious’ should certainly, especially be questioned. Why?

Simply because of how a concept of the Obvious is formed in our minds.

What do you do when you know something but you don’t know how or where from you know it? When you just know it, but you couldn’t explain it, or provide evidence? Well, our brains generally just conflates such knowledge with what is obvious. “Clearly this is just true,” the brain says, glancing askance at the massive workload that might be triggered should it have to dig out and replace this foundational brick in its wall of knowledge.

This makes sense. The brain is lazy. It doesn’t ‘want’ to do more work than it has to. If something has remained ‘obvious’ for long enough that it only now comes up for consideration, it’s probably not worth messing with that knowledge. Too much work, and frustrating work at that. I sympathise, brain, I really do.

However, there are a few problems with this approach, summarised (and simplified) with three different but related cognitive and memory biases we all share:

Availability heuristic: the tendency to overestimate the frequency of notable events (whereas notable events become notable precisely because they are infrequent)

Confirmation bias: the tendency to preferentially search for, interpret, and recall information that confirms or supports prior beliefs or values

The reiteration effect: the tendency to believe something simply because it keeps being repeated (even if you don’t notice it being repeated)

Again, I have to reiterate that this is the default setting for all human brains. And that last one, the reiteration effect, is crucial in the formation of the Obvious. It’s basically the way ideas that are commonly held in society are learned and remain unquestioned. That is, simply through constant repetition or implication. Some examples:

• Not only are good grades good, but the concept of grades in general is also obviously good (of course you can distill a judgment of everything someone has learned about a subject into a single-character metric… absolutely…)
• The police are there to protect you, obviously (unless you happen to be black, or protesting, or…)
• You need carrots and sticks to motivate people (no one ever does anything good without getting paid for it, you see)
• The best way to learn something is to intensely focus on it (what do you mean the brain learns by association?)
• The UK is obviously a democracy, because we vote for our leaders (from choices picked by…whom?)

At this point, I know I need to make a disclaimer:

I am not saying (here) that the examples above are not true. What I am saying is that they are taken to be Obvious, but their truth value is at the very least debatable. In other words; they are thought of as obvious, but they probably aren’t.

My claim is, simply: what is Obvious is not necessarily true. And, further, that there is a lot to learn by investigating whether or not it is.

Why the disclaimer?

There is a simple reason I knew I would have to make the disclaimer at that point. I know from experience that disputing any one of those examples I listed will absolutely be considered extreme in the sense previously discussed. I also know that the human brain’s response to a challenge to the Obvious is immediate discomfort and rejection.

As a result, if you believe and accept any of the ‘obvious’ thoughts above, then you are likely to have had an almost visceral reaction to the implication that they may not be true. This reaction would have essentially led to losing you as a reader at that point, in the best case. Or maybe at the very least, losing you as a reader who would put any stock in what I have written.

I know this, because I do hold and often express quite a few ideas that trigger such responses in people; the discussion I mentioned earlier is but the most recent example. I am also quite confident that I can provide good, valid reasoning for why I go against the Obvious with these ideas. If I didn’t, my heterodox belief wouldn’t be reasonable, it would be religious. But the reaction they get tend to make it really rather hard to even begin to get such reasoning across.

I should also note that, as a member of society I obviously hold many Obvious ideas as well, most of which will be invisible to me until they are challenged. Such is the nature of the Obvious.

In confronting such challenges, most people simply turn off their ability and / or willingness to even consider alternatives unless counterfactuals are put into extremely clear focus. This isn’t a criticism, or a put-down, it’s a description of how the brain handles acute cognitive dissonance:

Cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information. Relevant items of information include a person's actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, and values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress (…) [The] discomfort is triggered by the person's [pre-existing] belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.

Extremism is good, actually

This knee-jerk reaction of dismissal is rather worrying to me. Not because I, by my own admission above, hold several such extreme views myself. Rather, because of how these dynamics must then operate on the societal scale. We can investigate this with a few questions:

• What institutions in society most significantly wield the reiteration effect?
• Can those institutions — or their owners / managers — benefit from repeating untruths?
• Once something Obvious has established itself in society, will it dissolve itself once it stops being actively repeated or will it make society itself keep repeating it and thus maintain its status as Obvious?

I am not going to directly answer those questions, because I think the questions themselves are more valuable than any answer I might give. In large part because those answers would then be dismissable as subjective or biased, allowing our minds to perpetuate not just the Obvious but also the structures that maintain it.

I genuinely think the practice of simply asking questions like this is one of the most valuable habits you can learn. And so, I suggest that there is an inherent positive value to extreme ideas as well. They do a very particular thing, cognitively speaking: they break the taboo of the Obvious, and crack open the door just a little bit to considering the real truth value of what society takes for granted.

And if this is true, then I hope you will agree that it’s probably a good idea to become more aware of your own Obvious. To notice when your brain flashes its red alert at you to tell you that something is WRONG and you must RESIST and REJECT it at all costs. And then instead of asking how the extreme idea you just heard could possibly be believed, maybe ask yourself how the Obvious idea became obvious in the first place?