What is irrationality? Irrationality is the corruption of learning! At best, learning about our surroundings and ourselves is an imperfect process. At worse, the learning process is made difficult, impossible or self defeating by irrationality, which in turn promotes narrative behavior by denying us information about our environment and our effect on it.
In general, learning is directed and controlled by cognitive or perceptive ideas by which each person organizes information. An idea is both a mental determination and a program for behavior. Ideas are good if they are appropriate and adequate, or bad if the ideas are inappropriate or inadequate for the situations and problems at hand. Irrationality is a matter of unnecessarily modifying a good idea to the idea's detriment or unnecessarily adhering to a bad idea to ones disservice. We commonly do both, since we are emotionally involved with our ideas. Therefore a person may change their ideas to suit their self image while being reluctant to bring the idea into conformity with the information from their actual surroundings.
Basically an idea or thought is a system of belief and all people need something to believe in. Often it is a religious or political belief, whatever the basis for the that person's relationship to the world while defining what they consider to be proper behavior in it. Invariably each concept is accompanied by an ideology, an intellectual expression of beliefs. The irony of the human condition is that a persons behavior is often inconsistent with their specific ideology, particularly in matters of importance.
This self deceptive aspect of human nature is due the role the concept plays in binding groups together. The supposition is not only a behavioral/belief system for an individual, it also acts as a unifying force for society. However irrationality is introduced when language interpretations, social norms, dogma and sarcasm promote a positive feedback which takes irrational behavior to extremes unjustified by and often at odds with actual conditions. Language functions not only as a communication system for the group but also as a value system which defines the mental life of the members and therefore is a prime contributor to irrationality. On the positive side, language obviously makes it possible for people to discuss problems, processes and phenomena of which they are aware. On the other hand, language (much more subtly) affects the process of perception and makes that perception so ambiguous that people can readily accept unmistakable discrepancies between their beliefs and actions in many important self defining situations. For instance, crusaders murdering people in the name of Christ or businessmen working in the framework of Capitalism asking for aid from the government when competition hurts their specific interests. With perception now being ambiguous and subjective, irrationality is invited in, if not actually promoted, as people can usually find some verbal framework in which to rationalize their behavior, along with a scapegoat or an excuse to explain away their failures.
Therefore, it appears that the verbal nature of our concepts shapes human perception by blurring the boundary between the unwelcome fact and truth against self desired fancy. Many important facts and events may simply be ignored because they are not deemed important or interesting. We see as much with our minds as we do with our eyes and we are fully capable of perceiving conjured fantasies of events that did not happen or things that do not exist. Furthermore, if and when an actual event is perceived, it can be distorted with details added or omitted to suit the psyche of the observer.
Finally and most important of all, the concepts are coded, reorganized and given special meaning according to the individual perceivers particular value system. What any person perceives is very much affected by their own experiences, attitudes, motives and psychological defenses. We each really build our own reality by this process of sorting out our perceptions into categories. For instance, government agencies are notorious for taking on lives of their own at the expense of efficiency. As government bureaucracy grows entrenched, its ability to respond effectively to the public is reduced and even though the growth is regarded as a sign of success to the civil servants in charge, the accompanying inefficiency is regarded as stupid to the citizens trying to get action.
Since judgement is subjective and made from an arbitrarily, subconsciously selected prospective, people usually fail to see themselves as doing something irrational at the same time they are engaged in behavior detrimental to their own interests. They persist in such activity because they have a perception that defines success in terms of behavior undertaken while it simultaneously inhibits perceptions of undesirable consequences. During this process incoming information is most likely to be dismissed or misinterpreted if the information conflicts with or can not be adjusted to the persons existing belief system. It is only when the perception goes to excesses that the concept tends to be irrational. Behavior may go to an extreme because behavior functions as an intrinsically gratifying, internal reward system. Such self reinforcing behavior imposed on external conditions, in the absence of critical self examination, means that members of a group can become victims of their own excesses as inner directed, self inflicted behavior runs out of control and becomes disruptively self defeating and damaging.
