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Rationalization
2 min read · 449 words
Rationalization is the mind producing reasons for what the system has already decided to do, and presenting the reasons as if they had caused the decision.
The system makes most decisions below conscious awareness. Hormones, conditioning, emotional state, accumulated patterns — these produce the impulse, the inclination, the leaning. The conscious mind, observing the impulse, generates a story about why this is what should be done. The story sounds like reasoning. Often it is reasoning, run after the decision has effectively been made, to justify what was already going to happen.
This is not always dysfunction. Sometimes the underlying impulse is correct and the rationalization just supplies the verbal account of an accurate decision. The problem is that the same mechanism runs when the underlying impulse is not correct — when the operator wants something that doesn’t serve them, the mind generates plausible reasoning to justify pursuing it, and the operator experiences the decision as reasoned rather than as wanted-then-justified. The reasoning is doing the work of legitimation, not selection.
The diagnostic that surfaces rationalization: notice when the operator is producing many reasons for a decision, with increasing creativity. The single clear reason rarely needs elaborate support. The decision that requires three rounds of explanation, with new reasons appearing each round, is usually a decision the system wanted and the mind is now serving. The accumulation of justification often correlates with the weakness of the actual case.
From the chair: when about to act, run the diagnostic. Did I decide this for the reasons I’m now giving, or did I decide it and find the reasons afterward. The honest answer is uncomfortable in many cases. The decisions about food, about purchases, about relationships, about how the operator spends their day — many of these are made by the system and rationalized by the mind. The operator who recognizes the order — want first, reasoning second — has more accurate access to what is actually driving their behavior.
The application: when a decision does not survive honest examination of its reasons, that is information. It does not necessarily mean the decision is wrong. Sometimes the want is sound and the reasoning is just downstream rather than upstream. But it does mean the operator should evaluate the want directly, not the reasoning that was generated to defend it. The reasoning, once the operator sees it as rationalization, can be set aside, and the actual question — do I want this, and is the want serving me — can be examined cleanly.
The reasons you give yourself for what you do are often not the actual causes. Knowing this changes how the reasons should be weighted.