I've known people who believe firmly in the old paradigm of "barefoot and pregnant" as the proper state for women. I remember talking to a fellow (this one is really offensive; I apologize in advance) who had reconciled the question of creation vs evolution; his notion was that white people were created, while people of color were "descended from monkeys".
I would put those in totally different categories. The second one is a positive statement which can be addressed by evidence; the first one is a normative judgement which cannot (although I can't count the number of times I've heard people declare that things like "science" or "logic" or "reason" will prove that their normative judgements are correct).
The second one was something I heard from a classmate 'way back in high school, so maybe allowance can be made for a not-yet-matured brain. I think that it was the incredible racism of the comment that floored me at the time; would having a low opinion of people of another race be considered a normative (I had to look that up) judgment? Also, if I had made any attempt at evidence-based reasoning with him on this one, the only safe position at that time and place would be to argue that
all humans were the product of Creation. I grew up (and still live) in the rural south, and to question divine creation or
(horrors!!) to be an avowed atheist or agnostic, especially for a teenager, was to be a pariah.
Back years ago, while working as a Paramedic, my partner and I went to a call where it turned out that a 60-ish year old man had died in his sleep, in bed. As we and the M.E. examined the body we found that he was nude. My partner - a guy in his mid-20s - was incensed. His opinion was that "it ain't decent" for a grown man who lived alone to sleep nude.
My point is that there are a lot of people in this world who, even in the absence of any disorder found in the DSM-IV, have some (to me) very odd ways of thinking. I don't think it always falls under the heading of "willful ignorance" - it doesn't seem to me to be a lack of knowledge so much as something in the reasoning process. If not as "balmy", "bonkers", "flaky", or "a 'roo loose in the top paddock", how do we characterize them?
In the last particular case cited, I would characterise the person as someone who has a different value/judgement/preference system than you do (and also different than I do). If they don't attempt to impose this system on other people, it doesn't particularly bother me. I don't see that anything like "knowledge" or "reason" plays the slightest role here. Can you use knowledge and reason to prove that this viewpoint is incorrect? I don't know how.
I think the phrase bolded above is what worried me. I was in my 20s myself at the time, and still learning about the real world, I guess. The idea of a guy my own age - and this guy was a weekend-beer-guzzling, bed-hopping, hell-raising sort - who was that judgmental about something so innocuous (I forgot to mention that it was a hot August and the house had no A/C except for a window unit in the living room, so it could have been a practical matter as much as a personal preference) as sleeping in the buff in your own home... well, it just struck me that he could easily go on to become one of those legislators who are perfectly willing to extend the law into places it has no business going, such as the bedrooms of consenting adults.
(1)OK, it may well be that these weren't the best examples; they were just examples off the top of my head of some people that I consider to have odd world views. When dealing with Hoax Believers, maybe it does usually come down to willful ignorance. There's a guy on YouTube, for example, who puts out the most off-the-wall claims. For example, in this image:
It's the joint at the junction of one of the LM's legs and the footpad. He absolutely insists that the shadowed area on the ball at the end of the leg (arrow) is a void, and questions how the footpad could have stayed on with the "ball" so much smaller than the "socket". Absolutely nothing that was said could budge him from this conviction. ka9q and I have discussed the possibility that he has some kind of vision problem, since he also consistently misjudges perspective and has no sense at all of what shadows should look like.
This is Hunchbacked, of course - some may remember when he was on this board for a while as InquisitiveMind - and he still claims a degree in aeronautical engineering and believes that when orbiting the moon, the Apollo CSM/LM would have naturally maintained a horizontal orientation relative to the surface; I asked about that recently and he responded "
Yes, it does, because of the action of centrifugal force. Take a stick, tie a rope to its middle and make it turn: Its orientation will be perpendicular to the rope when you make it turn. Of course, there is no rope tied to the CSM, but the centrifugal force acts like there was a virtual rope tied to its center of gravity. This is physics, you may deny it, but this is physics."
Why should we, if they don't all fit the same category?
I realize this is a hot-button issue for you and I understand, really I do - I've spent some time in the place where they lock the doors to keep the world out, not the patients in.
Maybe it's just me, but sometimes when dealing with these... persons... frustration causes me to temporarily lose my formal vocabulary skills and grope for more visceral, descriptive terminology.
(1) That one got convoluted, didn't it? Sorry.
