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'Overuse of Occam's Razor?'
Anyway, I know that psychology is complex and the explanations I come up with are only my best hypothesis, not one that I would necessarily have >50% confidence in - I should have made that clear. Still, I have trouble thinking of other explanations for why intelligent, educated, friendly people claim to believe that about 50% - 95% of the population are evil?
Or that most old people deliberately vote for bad things because why should they care if they are going to die soon anyway?
Or that there is >50% probability that Brexit will literally lead to a neo nazi state in the UK within 10 years?
Or that the best way to defend democracy in the USA is to assassinate Trump and Pence... despite the fact that they were democratically elected and that the sympathy vote would push the USA far more to the right?
Or that someone would attempt to prove to me that a political party are evil, by showing me a meme saying that they are evil, as if messing about with photoshop confers truth, and then be unable to provide a single non-meme-based argument to support this assertion?
I mean, these beliefs are so crazy that if only one person were expressing these opinions I might worry that they are showing the early warning signs of some form of clinical paranoia. But its widespread, among people who otherwise seem functional.
Well, there is one simple explanation called bullshit.
A lot of people are willing to pronounce positions and statements that they will not be able to execute in reality.
Hopefully, most of them.