Second-handers are easy-to-vary

A non-Muslim used a good line of questions to expose an inconsistency
in a Muslim poster's worldview. And I chimed in to explain how the
Muslim will react and why he will do it.

http://islam-watch.org/authors/107-khalaf/1192-types-of-muslims.html#comment-66464

> Allah also permits killing apostates - do you agree with this Malem? Allah also permits marrying pre-pubescent girls - do you agree with this Malem? Allah also permits being ruthless to the unbelievers - do you agree with this Malem? If you do not agree with these permissions Allah gave Muslims, then why do you believe it's ok to have 4 wives? Malem, are you cherry-picking what suits you from your Quran?

He is cherry-picking, but he doesn't know it. Psychologists explain
this phenomenon with Cognitive Dissonance theory. I instead explain it
as the psycho-epistemology of most people today. Ayn Rand called them
second-handers, or second-handed thinkers. These people subconsciously
try to protect their self-image. That causes them to rationalize
nearly every conflict they experience by all sorts of methods, most of
which do not correspond with logic.

His ideas are inconsistent. That means many contradictions and
conflicts between his ideas. He grew up that way and doesn't know that
its bad.

This kind of person, this kind of mind, has the quality known as
"easy-to-vary". Rand called them second-handers. It means that his
ideas are easy to vary. That his worldview is easy-to-vary. So he can
make changes to his worldview by adding and subtracting and editing
his ideas when ever he wants without restrictions. Why no
restrictions? Because he doesn't care about consistency between his
values, and between his actions and his values.

He doesn't know the right way to do it, which is to try as best as one
can to make all of one's ideas to be consistent with eachother -- i.e.
to make his worldview self-consistent. The goal is to have as few
contradictions and conflicts as possible -- the best each one of us
can.

This kind of person, this kind of mind, has the quality known as
"hard-to-vary". Rand called them first-handers, or first-handed
thinkers. It means that his ideas are hard to vary. His worldview is
hard-to-vary. So he can't easily make changes to his worldview. It
takes a lot of effort. He has to make sure the new idea is consistent
with his other ideas. If he finds a conflict, then he sets out to
resolve the conflict so that he can figure out whether he will adopt
this new idea or reject it. How does he do it? Like this:

Consider each of the conflicting ideas to be theories, rival theories
that is. Which rival theory is correct? How do we determine that? We
criticize each of the theories. Then we criticize the criticisms. The
theory left uncriticized is considered the right one, for now. In the
future, someone can create a new criticism and the cycle continues.

-- Rami Rustom
http://ramirustom.blogspot.com