Time to destroy the lives of everyone that ever agreed with me.
Definition of Rationality -> A process of decision making to characterize belief of
action to be a norm concept of reasoning.
In other words, things that make sense to more than 3 people who aren't a group of friends in any part of
thinking.
Has anyone ever noticed that being rational is another way mankind coins a term to control people? By accepting the fact that you are rational, you are actually just following a conveyer belt of standard choice just because everyone else does the same thing. That at the end of it, in reality, you aren't really being rational.
I'll start with a description, the whole point of rationality and choice. The whole
point of the word rational was to somehow understand how people made choices and decisions in their lives with
circumstances they were in or were given WITHOUT the word rational being used when things were being told to them.
Rationality was not so much something used to govern your way of thinking.. but more of a term used to label you as
being rational because of the answers you gave. In this sense, lately people have been doing things because they
believed it was rational.. where did this belief come from? Norm of choice. Just because half the world does it.. it
somehow appears as the rational thing to do.. therefore you did it. This is the problem, and once again mankind has
messed up another term just like they messed up the term 'Stupidity'.
With this situation being given, people believe that this 'rationality' is good, therefore they do it. Society
is not being rational but rather being shown how to behave by these standard.. common choices.
Here's an example of people failing an aspect of being rational.
Let's say you're at your best friends wedding. You naturally prefer a cup of orange juice to rose syrup, and
prefer rose syrup to apple juice (because apple juice sucks (emphasis)). There's a cup of orange juice and apple
juice on the table, and your sisters kid loves orange juice.. but can drink apple juice just the same.
Now most reasonable people would take the orange juice instead of the apple juice, it is 'rational' that you
take things that you prefer when offered to you. However, politeness requires you to take the apple juice instead for
the sake of your sisters kid. So you take the apple juice and probably end up never drinking it. Is this irrational?
Because of being polite.. most people would tell you that you aren't.
So what does this really mean? Pretty much that the circumstance changed the reason why you
did something. You aren't taking the orange juice, not only because you're being polite, but because if you
took the orange juice from the kid.. it says something about you and the kind of person you are. How can you know
something so well and disregard it.. right? Reflects badly on you.
In this sense, you have been irrational by not taking something that you like and instead lived with something you
didn't like, but because of the situation you were in, you have been rational in what you did. It was rational of
you to put aside your own likes for a kid 30 years younger than you, and it also says good things about the kind of
person you are (at least.. -you- think it does, to most people that's common courtesy).
Because of simple things like politeness, independence and other personality or societal factors, rationality of choice does not really apply to anything. If you remove politeness from the given example, you would have done what you wanted to do. In essence, everything in the world doesn't matter and only doing what you like is what is rational. But because of that 1 factor, your preference no longer applies, because it does not exist any more now that you have politeness in the equation. Therefore 'rationality of choice' can not be applied by relating what we would initially do to what we do subsequently.
So given this overview, what does anyone conclude from this? This is surely not the act of
a rational man, because a rational man will do what he thinks is 'rational' to him without regard from other
factors. Basically this is not how rationality is judged by people who view rationality axioms, but instead becomes more
of a problem with it being rational in sense of conformity. We think it's right because it is what the majority
does. If the majority says being polite is taking only what you want, then doing what you did in the example is
reversed, and you were not being polite at all. Where is this 'rationality' that people talk about then?
I believe this whole rationality thing is used to predict how people behave, knowing he's going to do it for the
sake of being polite or independent. So once again the definitions have been.. destroyed. An interesting note is that
rationality itself is also not defined by being polite or anything of the sort either.
So once again it's a problem with society having extremely gimped standards on what exactly being rational is.. just like how there are extremely gimped standards on what being stupid means.
