QUOTE(dtobias @ Mon 20th September 2010, 11:36am)
It's part of the "geek mindset" (I know because I am one myself) that the abstract logical consistency of ideas and actions is of greater relevance than whatever real-world consequences the actions and ideas might have -- after all, the real world is messy, illogical, inconsistent, and full of annoying human beings, and hence is clearly inferior to the abstract logical plane.
Hence Spock. Alas, logic is a wreath of pretty flowers that smell... bad.
It's not just a geek mindset, it's generally a child's mindset. It's the
concrete stage that in Piaget comes before "formal operations." It's totally rule-driven and damn the consequences. It's one reason why pre-teens and computers go together better than you'd have thought at first guess. One accepts the rules without question-- they are never held "lightly" in the mind as "tentatively good, but subject to replacement or modification on new evidence."
Moulton, though it pains me to say it, is right about societies maturing through these same phases, just as humans do. Some never get past the black and white rule-driven binary "fundamentalist" stage.
And of course, some people never do, either. (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/unhappy.gif) Since formal operations are the last stage in mental maturity, you'd have to expect that a lot of people get stuck before that. Also, it's very handy to rulers for them never to make it out (even narcissists, in some ways stuck even in the stage before the concrete one, sometimes never make it past concretes in the rest of their thinking. But they find ways that the rigid rules don't apply to THEM).
I've had a glimpse of a stage past formal ops, which I occasionally see in very smart people who've lived a long time. But I think you have to be past a stage to clearly see it, and so I can't tell you much about it, much less define it. But by inductive construction (a little like adding dimensions in geometry) I think Stage V has something to do not only with easily playing with rules (stage IV), but with a meta-mode of easily playing with "rules about rules." Including social rules. (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/ohmy.gif)