A question: where does cluelessness / being out-of-touch come from?

One of the things I encountered while working in engineering was electrical/power engineers who would only consider the possibility that people installed solar panels to save money. 

I have been in meetings where made bewildered comments along the lines that there was no cost advantage, based on their calculations, so they could not understand what was happening. 

When I and others pointed out the possibility that people were doing so out of concern about the climate crisis, they often responded aggressively - including with personal threats. 

Those responses - especially the threats (which management chose to ignore when they were reported) - make it fairly clear that denialism based on fear of threats to their world views was a major aspect of what was happening, but I suspect that somewhere, at some time, someone was genuinely unable to grapple with a notion that they had not come across before - it is almost as if they were varying the “my pappy was a power engineer, and his pappy and his grand pappy afore him” (these engineers were white cisgender males) trope to include “because no-one has ever mentioned that sort of possibility, it could not possibly exist”. 

More broadly, that sort of cluelessness / being out-of-touch incompetence crops up in other areas as well (although I was pleased at reading a newspaper article which made exactly the same points that we did). 

I have written about other examples which you can find by clicking on the “flawed thinking/emotions/reactions/governance” label below (URL added here for those using mobile phones, as Blogger and/or mobile phone companies don’t seem to allow labels to be visible).

Where does that shortcoming of personality/character or amathia come from? Where do they get such weird notions / weirdness from?

We, as a species, need to know so we can help people to overcome that flaw (or flaws) for the sake of our survival ...

 

 

Assumptions / basis 

In writing this, I have assumed / started from the following: 

• this blog states quite clearly that it is about political and human rights matters, including lived experience of problems, and thus I will assume readers are reasonable people who have noted the content warning in the post header;
  

Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:

• there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”; 
  
• I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
  

 

 

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Remember: we need to be more human being rather than human doing, and all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering”.

Copyright © Kayleen White 2016-2024     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike basis   https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/