Roe is Me

There is no better example of our distinction between Rote and Process than the current battle in Texas over abortion rights. To be clear, I have no sympathy for uneducated emotional religious people who, after somehow gaining control of politics, have attempted to move an already ailing political environment downward into a "lower run of hell." But with that said, my point here is a distinction.

We have previously talked about the distinction between Rote "memorized" knowledge and Process "integrated" knowledge and, though the distinction is much more complex than it at first appears. We have decided that we can use these terms, in these ways, and that what is left to do to clarify the issue is to provide examples.

Why is Rote-only thinking so dangerous? Operating from memorized-knowledge

only without the aid of complex critical thinking strategies make one's thinking and consequently one's behavior random. In an objective "real" world unprocessed information is weak. It leads to bad choices. This is why religion works at gaining power and influence. Rand used to write that the alternative to reasoned information and the resultant critical moral choice is a random mind. It is a person at the whim of other ideas, external ideas, and chaos. In the real world and in real life choices must be made (independent of the modern nihilism that, I suppose, pretends they don't). These choices are either based on critical strategies that an individual has worked on, or they are based on whim. The latter use of the word "based" here is loose because the alternative to critical thought is a mental life based on nothing, with no real goals in reality, and without any "pure" reason. Though it is not a great example, imagine someone who gives a lot of thought to what they want to do with their life and, because of innate talents and reasoned preferences, chooses to become an architect and produce "real" things. Then imagine someone who doesn't really participate in reality, becomes what their parent's want them to become, abandons this because they have no innate talent for it (I don't know … psychologist), and then gives up and goes to court-reporting school and then eventually works at Chilis. Rote-only thinking tells you nothing about the real world and gives you nothing on which to base choices.

The Texas judges who have decided more than once that as a majority they choose the primitive side of the "choice" debate to be law are, more so than any group I have lambasted, operating from Rote-only thinking. Do I know each one of them personally? No. I do not need to. This debate, though I don't want to explicate it, is so clear cut and actually not dialectical (not a debate, not with two clear opposing sides) that a commonsense thinker knows instantly what it means. If a commonsense thinker can know this and a Texas judge cannot, that tells us everything we need to know about the judge. And perhaps about the system.

I cannot spend unnecessary time here discussing the non-debate because the second rule of commonsense is "don't waste one's time learning about nothing," ie. don't read the bible. Life is short. Learn real things. Play video games before you immerse yourself in topics devoid of any truth or practical use.

I will only say that the issue, reproductive rights, has already been easily and carefully understood in the context of a free society, so thoroughly that the debate had become "purely" religious. I will say that Texas and the other poorly educated states (all in the South; I encourage you to research school performance and overall education rankings) have obviously taken a step backwards in the process of pretending, due to an overwhelmingly emotional, irrational, and whim-based Rote thinking, that their intuitions trump Science and the rational model of modern democracy.

When Rote-only thinking is valued as an autonomous antecedent to social and political resolutions, when big decisions are made by primitive religious people (not critical, not directly in opposition to the perceived opposite; loosely from an anti-critical childishness) we take real steps back into the Dark Ages.

Pro-life and Pro-choice are not two opposing arguments, one wanting to preserve and one wanting to kill, they are essentially ingredients in a debate between random guesswork thinking and goal-directed pragmatic politics, the latter being the only thing sustaining our weak, rusting union. There is in fact no "choice." To attempt to hold the untenable "Pro-life" position comes with a mandatory forgetting and irrationality. It can only be maintained in conjunction with Rote-only authoritarianism. It can hold no sway over a Process thinker. It is purely irrational, not merely wrong. I am embarrassed here in the shadow of three hundred years of "progress" attempting to explain again the primitive audacity of the Pro-life "position," and the dangers it present for this debate and all others.