The problem here is that “Anecdotal Evidence” and “Lived Experiences” must be disregarded outright, by pure virtue of how your brain works. Allow me to explain.
Your brain is the most incredibly advanced accomplishment ever achieved by evolution. It’s the complex pinnacle of billions of years of evolutionary effort – and it is entirely unreliable.
I want you to think, for a moment, about your favorite personal memory from your early life. The happiest you can remember being when you were a kid. Close your eyes, and picture it in your mind as clearly as you can. Remember every single detail as closely as you can. Was it hot outside? How were you feeling? What day of the week was it? Who were you with? Now clear your mind and consider this:
It didn’t happen. Not how you remember it, anyway. Not exactly.
Memory is a strange thing. Between the time the light enters our eyes and the time it reaches the part of our brain where we’re aware of it, what we see passes through a dozen different filters that we aren’t even aware of. Filters that range from primal categorization of possible threats, to memories of similar situations we might have been in before, or read about, or seen on TV. These filters modify our perceptions of what we experience as we’re experiencing it, without us even knowing it’s happening. Our past experiences, our worldview, even the weather can affect how a memory is written down in our mind. By nature, we remember things in such a way as to paint us in the best possible light. What’s more, our memories of past events can change over time.
Imagine, for example, that something embarrassing happens to you, or you lose your temper, or you make a mistake. Later on, you’re mulling over the situation, and you remember something that the other person did that didn’t register with you at the time, but it makes your reaction seem more reasonable in hindsight. Chances are the next time you recall that situation, you will remember the other person’s actions as a primary reason for your discretion, even though it couldn’t have effected your actions, because you didn’t notice it at the time.
Or imagine that you’re at a party, and a woman walks up to your group that has a purple streak in her hair reminiscent of a girl who broke your heart in middle school. As she walks up, you may not even consciously remember the girl who broke your heart, but this new woman will trigger the memory in the back of your mind and associate her with those bad feelings. In the second it took for you to look at her, your mind will have modified your perception of her to the point where you think to yourself, “This girl looks like trouble” even though you don’t consciously know why you’re thinking that. You might even chalk it up to intuition.
What’s more, your perception of her actions will be flavored under that original perception. If you see her doing something nice for someone else, you’ll dismiss it. (“Everyone should be doing that anyway, why should she get extra credit for being a decent human being?”) Conversely, if you were to find out she drunkenly hooked up with some guy at that party, your initial perception will color that as well. (“I knew she was a slut the second I saw her!”) It doesn’t matter that she was close friends with her hookup in high school, they lost contact for years, randomly met each other at this party and will be married in a year. You don’t know that, and you don’t bother to find out because it wouldn’t validate your initial perception of her. Human beings, as a rule, will jump through every mental hoop in the book in a split second to prove themselves right, but won’t expend any mental energy at all to prove themselves wrong.
Memories also change over time, and you don’t know it’s happening. Every time you remember something, your memory could be different than the last time you accessed it, and you’d never know. When we recall something to mind, it often jars loose a “related” memory in our mind, and that other memory can be integrated into the event we’re recalling. The other memory might only be related because we were with the same people, or were wearing the same shirt, or the weather was similar that day. If we hear a similar story told by another person, we can integrate their experiences into our memory without even realizing it. And to us, the memory will be so seamless that we would swear that it all happened together, just as we remember, even though it didn’t.
Let’s take as a mental exercise, the example of the whole Bill Cosby thing. I will note before I begin that I’m not saying that I think this is what’s going on. I don’t have enough evidence to form an informed opinion on the matter. I don’t have any evidence that I can put forth indicating that this is the case. I’m just putting it forth as a mental exercise, and adding purely invented facts so that we can create a hypothetical.
Let us theorize that Bill Cosby is a terrible lay, and heavy into bondage. As a result, 30 years ago he had a consensual sexual encounter with a woman who was left completely unsatisfied and a little weirded out by his tastes. Later on, when recalling the situation, she thinks about how bad the sex was. “The sex was even worse than the guy in highschool who coerced me into sex by lying to me, and that was practically rape!” A few years pass, and the next time she recalls the Cosby memory, it has become tied in her mind to the time in high school – and elements from the high school memory have found their way into the Cosby memory, without her realizing it. Thirty years later, the original memory has been recalled, modified, and re-remembered so many times that the is actually recalling several of her early sexual encounters in the context of the Cosby memory, and she doesn’t even know it. She musters up the courage to step forward and tell her (unbeknownst to her, completely inaccurate) account of being coerced into sex with Bill Cosby. Other women who have had unsatisfying sexual relationships with Bill hear her account, and it influences their memory of their own experiences. (“He did fill me full of a lot of Champaign and pushed to convince me to have sex with him… Oh my God, I was coerced too!) Their recollection of events changes based on this new information, and they step forward as a victim – despite the fact that they were so Star-Struck by Cosby that they actively pursued him. A far-fetched, but plausible explanation if we were to take the first two assumptions as fact.
It is also the reason that the witnesses in the Ferguson incident might give an account of the events that are proven to be wholly inaccurate by all evidence subsequently gathered, and why they will stick to their account even when faced with that evidence. Their memory of the event was modified by their own perceptual filters, misrecorded in their minds due to the stress of the situation, and validated by their own minds when they were asked to recall the event later. They might believe that their account of what happened is 100% accurate and that it happened exactly how they remember it – but what they remember happening is not what actually happened.
This is one of the reasons social justice warriors are so dangerous. They allow their worldview to directly effect their self-worth. So much so that everything that occurs around them passes through that filter, and is misrecorded in their memories in a way that validates their worldview, and thus their self-worth. What they see and what they recall are different from what actually occurred – but they don’t know it. They erroneously believe that their perception of a situation is infallible, and will fight anyone who questions that perception to the bitter end, because any suggestion that their perception is inaccurate is an attack on the worldview (and thus, the feelings of self-worth) that informed that memory.
TL;DR – SJW’s literally trick their minds into believing their own BS – and they don’t even know it.