Crimes of Logic

Lack of rationality isn't the problem

"Albert Camus" by DietrichLiao is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Last month, Malik Faisal Akram took four people hostage in a synagogue in Texas. He demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, an Al Qaeda operative serving time in a prison in the same state for attempted murder. Siddiqui has claimed the case against her was based a Jewish conspiracy. Akram released one hostage and the other three escaped. He was fatally wounded by police soon afterwards.

Some 170 people have pled guilty to crimes on 6th January 2021 when a mob stormed the Capitol building in Washington DC. At least seven of them have admitted felony crimes like assault or impeding law enforcement. Some 70 people have been sentenced, with punishments ranging from two months of probation to five years in prison. Members of the mob believed the 2020 US presidential election was fraudulent and tried to overturn it.

A nurse in Sicily, Italy, has been arrested for forgery and embezzlement. She was filmed emptying a COVID-19 vaccine before injecting a patient who wanted a certificate without receiving the treatment. The nurse is accused of doing the same thing for herself and other family members. There are, of course, a number of conspiracy theories about the vaccines and the disease.

What is striking about all three situations is how rational the people were. If you really believe that the Jews control everything that happens in the world, then storming into a synagogue to get someone released from prison actually makes a weird kind of sense. Likewise, if you believe that an incoming government is illegitimate, then storming a government building probably doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. And if you think that COVID vaccines are dangerous, then emptying the syringe first makes perfect sense.

Albert Camus, the French philosopher and author, once wrote: “There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.” In these cases, we are clearly dealing with crimes of logic. However, as Camus rightly points out, these crimes have a passionate element too, whether that involves kidnapping innocent people, storming government buildings, assaulting police officers or deliberately increasing the risk of dying from a dangerous disease.

We have already seen that humans are very good at rationalizing. In all these cases, the people involved were if anything too rational. It is for this reason that I am reluctant to identify as a rationalist - a group of people who are also interested in areas like skepticism, the Bayesian approach and prediction markets. One of the most famous rationalists is an author and blogger called Julia Galef, who we have mentioned before. Her work is generally excellent and highly recommended, despite my disagreement with the rationalist tag.

Instead of a lack of rationality, I think several things went wrong in the cases mentioned above. First of all, the people involved almost certainly trusted their gut instincts too much. This set them on the wrong course. Their lack of methodology meant that they didn’t have any means of getting back on track after starting off in the wrong direction.

On a deeper level, the people involved in all these cases divided people up like insects, in George Orwell’s famous words. Akram thought that Jewish people were in some way different from other human beings. The people who stormed the Capitol thought that the whole government, a major political party, the media and election officials had all joined forces to rob ordinary members of the public of the true result. The Italian nurse assumed that the entire medical establishment was corrupt.

The urge to divide the world into goodies and baddies can be a little infantile. Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to a much more sophisticated perspective during his eight years in his country’s forced labour camps during the communist era. The Gulag forced prisoners to collaborate with the regime, often in small ways, in order to survive. It became very hard to say who were the goodies and who were the baddies.

Solzhenitsyn famously wrote: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

There is hard-won wisdom in these 61 words. If we assume other people are baddies while we are pure of heart, we can always be drawn into crimes of logic. If, on the other hand, we assume that we are all capable of great evil, we should probably pause for a moment before taking hostages, storming government buildings or tampering with other people’s medical treatments. See you next week!

Further reading

Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago

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[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.