In adopting a worldview, here is the correctly ordered chronology of events:
  1. We separate feelings that make us feel good from those that make us feel bad. We desire to chase those feelings that make us feel good and avoid the bad ones.
  2. We choose beliefs that integrate with our existing beliefs, which are designed to keep the good feelings going, or avoid causing us bad feelings.
  3. We find the evidence to back up the beliefs we want to have, in order to justify the those beliefs that make us feel good.
We live in a culture that values rationality and a scientific mindset over living at the whims of your own emotions and desires. After we adopt a worldview, we doublethink. The pernicious lie that we tell ourselves is that the steps I listed above occur in reverse. We deceive ourselves into thinking that we first found the evidence, then a belief system proceeded from this evidence, and then our feelings came from this belief system.

This becomes a problem when people interact with one another. People present "evidence" to me all the time about their worldview, convinced that in the face of this evidence, I'll come to believe what they believe. They believe that another rational person like myself will inevitably converge on the same conclusion that they have. The evidence will be input into my brain, the crank will turn, and out will pop the same belief. If this doesn't happen, then I can merely be dismissed as irrational.

It's in this way that we each try to coerce each other into believing what we ourselves believe. This is also the cause of frustration when others argue with our viewpoints. It so simple, we think to ourselves. The evidence is clear, the data points outline an arrow pointing to a singular conclusion, so why can't the other person see this?

Intellectualizing defeats itself because it leads us to believe that we can actually intellectualize. As a human being, I'm little more than the sum of my desires. My beliefs about the world are a persona that represents these desires expressed in language.

So it is all with people. We spend years of feeling, thinking, and aggregating ideas about the world in order to formulate who we are and what we believe. Somehow, we trick ourselves into thinking that in the short space of a brief conversation with another person, we can use language to not only adequately represent who are, but to convince the other person that they should be more like us.