In public choice theory, “rational ignorance” refers to the choice not to inform oneself on some issue when the costs of doing so outweigh the benefits — in particular, when they outweigh the likelihood of one’s vote influencing the outcome of an election or one’s political pressure influencing a politician’s decisions. It also makes sense based on the finitude of time and energy: people are, naturally, more apt to devote more of those things to the affairs of their immediate family, job, friends, and neighbors, than to issues of public policy.

Unfortunately, when people choose to remain ignorant about something, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they fail to form opinions about it. If people have an understandable tendency to limit the effort they put into learning about social or public policy issues, they frequently also have a tendency to form strong opinions about national issues based on relatively little information. Hence the prevalence of strong negative — bigoted, in other words — opinions about LGBT people, People of Color, and immigrants. 

I was reminded of this today, in direct message conversation with a friend. Concerning her boss, she said:

He’s a very flawed man and we’re diametrically opposed in our beliefs, but we keep quiet about it and he does me kindnesses. In return, I periodically remind him to drink water throughout the day. This is literally the nicest thing I could do for a filthy MAGAt.

I expressed some hope, based on the fact that there are people who are better than their beliefs is probably another reason for hope. She replied:

The psychology involved behind it is currently beyond my ken…. These people will rescue literally anybody when a historical flood happens with their jacked up trucks and jeeps and boats. But when the disaster is over, it’s right back to hatred again.

Surprisingly often,  people respond, when engaging directly with someone from a marginalized group, in ways that totally contradict their abstract beliefs about them as a group based on their ideology and the stances they take in political discourse.

Consider, for example, the expressions of dismay when people who enthusiastically voted for Trump based on his promises of mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, at seeing the actual human faces of the victims of this policy.

Or consider the 29 Republicans who defected and voted against an anti-trans bill in the Montana state legislature after hearing moving speeches from two trans legislators. I can’t track down where I saw it, unfortunately, but one elderly man who had shown up to testify in favor of the bill apologized and stated that he had changed his mind and opposed it, based on what he’d learned from his interactions in the waiting area. Many people are hateful even in person; but many more, despite having hateful beliefs about entire categories of people in the abstract, act like decent human beings when they encounter them in real life.

Why is this? I don’t think we’re equipped, as a species of ape that evolved in an environment where most of our interactions and decisions concerned small groups of a few dozen people, to deal rationally with a large volume of issues on a continental or planetary scale, based on a symbolically mediated reality brought to us by a global communications system. Human beings are prone to major cognitive blinders and distortions, which become greater the further we’re separated from direct experience. When our perception of other people is primarily governed, not by our direct experiences interacting with them from birth, from one day to the next, but in terms of abstract ideological categories which we receive second-hand from cultural apparatuses like OANN or Radio Rwanda, the results more often than not are pathological. That’s why there’s so frequently such a stark difference between how people treat each other in direct human interactions and how they advocate for treating others as members of abstract groups.

Part of the reason might be that when dealing with abstract, distant, symbolically mediated groups of people, the social and psychological cost is quite low. However, when one comes face-to-face with a member of an outgroup, the cost becomes more apparent and salient.

That’s one reason why, as an anarchist, I believe we need to devolve as many functions and decisions affecting our lives as feasible to local bodies with which we are in direct daily contact such as self-managed workplaces and public services, with as much direct democracy as possible in cases where a consensus is required. And whatever large-scale functions remain, over extended geographical areas, should be managed as much as possible by standing platforms whose functioning is mostly automatic and administrative rather than political — as Saint-Simon put it, “replacing the government of persons by the administration of things.”

None of this is to say, of course, that abstraction or symbolic thought is bad. Without them literature, music, art, science, history, and philosophy would not exist. The problem lies with requiring competent decision-making in areas where direct experience is replaced entirely with a symbolically-mediated reality. It lies, further, in deciding how to treat the actual, flesh-and-blood human beings in front of us based on second-hand ideological categories, and viewing them simply as stand-ins for those categories and losing sight of their humanity.

We see people learning very late — sometimes too late — to see human beings where previously they saw only an NPC called the “illegal alien” or the carrier of “gender ideology.” It should not be this way. We should see humanity first.