Perfectionism and Rationality
I guess increasing the level of rationality (specially among politicians) in each country and society is one of the most important goals of social engineers. It is one of the biggest challenges in developing countries like Iran as well. We see so many claims, policies, goals, etc. in all different levels from politicians to ordinary people which has no ground and with a simple logical overview you notice there is no support for those ideas. But how it happens? How you can establish an acceptable level of rationality and make it common sense? Obviously, west has done a much better job in this area and I was always wondering how it happened and where was the start point.
These days, I think one of the important ‘practices’ which is very well established in west is ‘how to do yourself’ guides and those manuals play an important role in this regard. Of course anyone knows how to fix a chair, but when you create some guidelines for it, and provide best practices and a wide range of tools and methods it encourages everyone to do it in a more professional way and it increases the overall rationality in everyday life and automatically you expand it to other aspects of your decisions and becomes a method of thinking . This idea can be applied in almost anywhere: driving, swimming, etc. A good example is driving. Driving a car looks simple, but adjusting the speed to traffic, number of stops you make, etc. distinguishes a good driver from a bad one. In another word, being perfectionist is an essential element in developing and establishing rationality. Perfectionism is not something in addition to rationality, it is part of it and should become part of the culture.
PS. In this post, I used rationality as a technical term (not vs. craziness!).