Heretics

It’s hard to think against the herd – there’s often a price exacted for doing so. But it’s easy to think like everyone else – no trouble there.

Nice quiet life.

Of course this means that if you are going to be a contrarian, you’ll probably only be one if you have good reasons.

Ones solid enough to make it worthwhile taking some pain.

A bit of light ostracisation.

Of course, just because contrarians have reached their beliefs through a process of reasoning, doesn’t mean they are right. It might be fallacious reasoning, that proceeded from a false premise, and have a wonky truth table.

But some reasoning will have been done.

But conformists don’t always need reasoning.

It’s enough to believe what everyone else does, or what the BBC headline says.

I’ve asked people why they believe a thing and they look at me blankly, as if having done ANY reasoning before believing a thing is an alien concept to them.

And I’ve concluded that there are as few contrarians that have reached their positions with NO reasoning, as there are conformists that have done any.

Almost no conformists have reasoned their way to their current position.

And almost all contrarians did.

So if we divide the number of unreasonable contrarians by the number of reasonable conformists, we might get a very simple answer.

Just remember…….“A man who has not reached his position through reason, cannot be reasoned out of it”