People treat reason as if it were the most minor and harmful aspect of a whole human being. It is as if a soldier standing guard were to say to himse… - Robyn Dawes

Two biases of memory, however, tend to enhance the illusory nature of our retrospective “understanding” of our own and others’ lives. The first is that we tend to overestimate specific events relative to general categories of events. The second is that we tend to recall specific events and to interpret them in ways that make sense out of a current situation—“sense” in terms of our cultural and individual beliefs about stability and change in the life course. Thus, memories, which appear to be beyond our control as if we are observing our previous life on a video screen, are like anecdotes in that they are often (inadvertently) “chosen for a purpose.” The result is that they will tend to reinforce whatever prior beliefs we have, just as anecdotes tend to reinforce the points they are meant to illustrate.

The realpolitik view of the individual human—that we are slaves to our desires and attitudes and that knowledge and rationality are necessarily secondary to these other factors—is simply wrong. We have the competence to be knowledgeable and rational, especially when we interact freely with each other. We can indeed change our minds. We can “bend over backward to be defense attorneys against our own pet ideas.” We can reconsider. We can be rational.

What causes the lunatic to demand that ideas not be subject to scrutiny—and in particular that they not be contradicted? No one knows. It may be part of a deliberate campaign to maintain power, an implicit admission of some semiconscious fear that the ideas might not be good, or just a common aspect of types of behavior that we associate with historical monsters. At least, the correlation is there.