Given that we are, uniquely, creatures who inhabit the realm of meaning, making coherent sense of the world is an imperative for us. There are two ways of doing this.
1. Emerging from the simple fact of being alive and observing the world, politics etc and making deductions that make sense of them after the fact using nothing but reason.
2. Before the fact adopting an off the peg template that ‘explains’ everything in certain terms. This template then frames the mind so that all events are interpreted as reinforcing, further proof of its truth.
In the case of 2. to accept that certain events contradict the framing is seen as a danger to the continuation of it as the thing that makes sense of the world. This is why there is such a desperate fight over what events mean. The abandonment of the template represents a falling into an abyss of incomprehension and a need for reappraisal. Nails are broken and knuckles are bloodied in this struggle to cling on.
There should be an almost clinical name for the syndrome in 2.
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