Sat, May 23, 2026 page8

• Politics are confusing our ability to reason

  • By Shih Wen-yi 施文儀
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  I recently came across a post from a 65-year-old relative of mine on Facebook. A graduate of Taiwan’s top university and self-proclaimed supporter of Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), they had taken to social media after completing a senior citizen health check-up to praise the system and profess their gratitude to Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安).

  I could not help but chuckle — check-ups for adults and older people are, of course, national-level health policy programs funded by the central government.

  They are not local policies, but are included in the National Health Insurance (NHI) budget with the aim of disease prevention, and early detection and treatment. It is difficult to believe that even after 31 years of the NHI system, there are well-educated Taiwanese who have yet to realize this.

  In reality, the role of a local mayor is to supervise municipal hospitals and ensure the quality of healthcare services. Ascribing such a long-standing, basic public service to the benevolence of a local politician is a severe misreading — one that takes the credit for centrally-coordinated achievements while offloading the responsibility for failures onto others.

  This habit of taking credit for successes and blaming opponents for failures is endemic to Taiwan’s political spectrum, and could be found throughout blue and green camps alike. Many people also make the mistake of assuming that higher education automatically confers objectivity and rationality. However, the evidence suggests that political judgements are rarely made based on facts alone, but are shaped more by identity and group affiliation.

  When a person has already picked an ideological side, they inevitably process information differently due to confirmation biases and pre-motivated reasoning. At that point, the brain’s central processing unit is no longer dealing with just facts, but emotional projections.

  Higher education can even equip people with the ability to better rationalize their positions rather than meaningfully question them. This is at play behind Taipei’s rat crisis, the anxiety of Chiang’s supporters over the attention Democratic Progressive Party Legislator and Taipei mayoral candidate Puma Shen (沈伯洋) has been receiving, and people framing health check-ups for older people as personal favors from Chiang.

  If Taiwan is to move toward a more mature democracy, it urgently needs to improve its capacity for objective and rational deliberation. Only by moving past overly emotional politics and idol worship, and seeking truth from facts in the evaluation of public policy, could society build genuine cohesion.

  Before we rush to applaud or endorse any political figure, it might be worth first letting our emotions settle and seeing things for what they are, rather than letting our rationality become clouded by the prejudice of political allegiance.

  Shih Wen-yi is a former deputy director-general of the Centers for Disease Control.

  Translated by Gilda Knox Streader
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