The Social Mirage of Rational Choice

Before killing his co-workers, Andre Bing wrote a note that said “My true intent was never to murder anyone”. The note seemed to be a sincere effort to explain something that needed no explanation. He simply felt like killing some people. I might equally write a note about why I am about to eat popcorn. A person with student debt, might even invent a rational moral treatise on why his debt should be forgiven. And an angry and jealous person will compose an equal and opposite treatise.

I used to live a few blocks from a convenience store where they sold 40’s of malt liquor. Every few weeks I would get a feeling that I wanted a bottle. I would think about walking to the store and drinking a glass and putting the rest in my fridge, and that is what I would do. At some point I realized that my thirst for beer – for something cold and bitter – was simply thirst. If I simply drank a glass of water, my visions of walking to the store or putting beer in the fridge would vanish. People do similar things when they imagine getting a hotel room in South Beach, when all they really want to do is get drunk. I imagine people who seek out child porn images or talk to children on the Internet, are first awakened at night by a mindless impulse to turn on their computers.

Impulses lead to choices and plans and actions, in a way that is often invisible to the actor. But what follows is organized storytelling, fake invented reasons that come after the actions they are supposed to explain. People who dream of shooting strangers or hate smug Hollywood stars posting on Twitter, start claiming to love the Constitution. Very few people are honest even with themselves, about why they vote for a particular politician or choose socialism. Someone recently reflected that he must not be motivated by money, when he chooses to spend his life educating others how socialism will lead to poverty. Isn’t socialism just a blind impulse to control the world around you?

My friend was recently convicted of murder, when her boss made her come to his house to get paid, and then fell off his balcony. She was convicted of tricking him into inviting her over, and then chasing him off the balcony, a conclusion which is the product of groupthink despite being contradicted by all evidence, even to the point of witnesses swearing something different from what they actually saw. The actual evidence is my friend was lured to his house by an impulse to smoke weed, was not even conscious at the time she was convicted of planning and coordinating the crime, and to this day does not know what happened.

People imagine similar rational actions by Kim Hallock in the Crosley Green case. They imagine the fact that Chip Flynn only said “get me out of here” or Kim drove to a familiar place to call 911, prove Kim Hallock was scheming to kill her boyfriend and cover it up. They go a step further to say I must be motivated by bias or a nefarious plot or complex mental malady, when I point out everything they say about Kim Hallock is invented lies and groupthink. In both cases, my friend and Kim Hallock, people simply have a witch trial impulse to torture cute young girls. But they will go through elaborate legal charades and even lie to themselves that they are puritans pursuing morals, when they indulge their basest impulses.

More recently a federal magistrate recited a series of laws and legal standards that dictated how she was supposed to analyze the evidence in my case. She then ignored all the laws, and misstated the evidence, to simply follow her impulses and the convenience and safety of joining the group, and come up with a nonsensical non sequitur legal explanation of her actions. Legal outcomes are decided socially or by a quorum, and then the evidence and process is fixed to obtain the socially popular outcome in what is more a ritual masquerading as a legal process.

In politics people invent a fictional narrative of information and argument being disseminated to voters who then make informed, rational choices. But the real process is the opposite, and the purported rational explanation follows the impulse. People have an impulse to vote for a particular candidate, most often just to punish someone they don’t like same as Andre Bing. They then parrot whatever public figure provides some catchy explanation to justify their choice.

It is all just a mindless mob of idiots parroting each other and seizing on any phrase that might socially explain their impulse-driven actions, like animals in the forest with clouds of theory and nonsense floating above them. The social exchange of words is a theater of lies played by animals. What people say is as irrelevant to what they do, as their facebook profiles are to who they are.