Thought Processes

It's occurred to me over the past several months that while you hear terms thrown around---particularly in election years---about "right thinking" and "wrong thinking", I'm not sure how valid those terms are. Thought is a process, not an event, and generally what folks mean by "right thinking" is not that your process is particularly good, or that the steps meet some obscure objective correctness test, but that your conclusions are "right", also known as "in agreement with the person judging the quality of your thought."

And of course "wrong thinking" is "you don't agree with me, you MUST be doing it wrong."

But unless we're actually talking about "you are (according to the rules of logic) taking the wrong steps in processing a syllogism", I don't think those are valid terms.

We "think" about things in a variety of ways; the things we think about are also widely varied. It makes sense to me that, then, the important measure of how we think about some particular thing is whether or not it's productive.

Seems like most folks tend to think about just about everything in their life in the same way: some folks deal with everything emotionally and/or intuitionally, and their language reflects that. "I feel that Sam is the correct candidate" "I feel it will be a long time before he gets that raise" "I feel that 20 people will respond to our party invitation" and so forth. And it works for them, more or less---well enough that they tend not to stop and look at where it fails and why and...oops, wrong group. :) Well, they tend not to feel where it doesn't work and do something different.

Then there's the analytical folks, and it may well already be long obvious reading this blog that I'm in that bunch. Always have been. Not a fence sitter but severely in that camp. Which of course means that sooner or later it should occur to me to stop and analyze exactly when and where stopping and analyzing doesn't work, no? :)

Later rather than sooner, I guess. All that has been to lead up to this point: I've been trying to figure out why trying to sort out certain people/events/situations throughout my life has always failed. It's always become a circular morass with no solution---something of a logical equivalent to dividing by zero. And I've finally found the mantra that covers the situation.

You cannot apply logic to dysfunctionality.

Long version has something to do with dysfunctionality by its very nature being a form of chaos, and logic assumes coherence. Doesn't matter. The point is that dysfunctional families, dysfunctional households, dysfunctional people, dysfunctional friendships, dysfunctional work situations, dysfunctional parishes---whatever---do not operate by any logic other than an internal, twisted version of logic. Usually one living in one individual's mind, to which the other inhabitants of the situation learn to imitate well enough to function in the situation. And that learning is so subtle and gentle, they don't realize that what they're learning in "getting to know the place" is the rules of its dysfunctionality.

(That may be true of all situations, and there may be no true functionality anywhere. But I'm referring to the more severe cases, situations which tend to be destructive to many or all persons involved.)

But that's not "source code" to the logic, it's just a "workaround"---so that the longer a person is outside that dysfunctional situation, the more of an "outsider" they become---if the situation is past, they lose their understanding of how it functioned; if it's current, they lose their ability to blend back in, and/or the rules continue to evolve without them, so that they no longer have the correct key, nor can they.

Doesn't entirely matter. What matters is acquiring the ability to derail the brain from that circular trap by repeating the mantra.

You cannot apply logic to dysfunctionality.

You cannot apply logic to dysfunctionality.

You cannot apply logic to dysfunctionality.

You cannot apply logic to dysfunctionality.

Here endeth today's lesson. :)