Believe Me When I Tell You
Or don’t. You’ll believe what you already believe because you’re a human.
Why do people believe what they believe? It seems a particularly relevant question to ask in these reckless times. Relevant because many of the people in charge hold vise-grip beliefs in demonstrably false ideas and many of the people who voted them into power have even weirder and more wildly unsubstantiated worldviews.
Some examples relevant to our current political crisis:
Reaganomics: The belief that lower taxes on the wealthy will boost capital investment to such a degree that overall tax income to the government will grow. Test cases have shown this is not a valid economic theory.
Biblicists: The belief that homosexuality has no biological basis and is simply a choice/sin engaged in by the venal and ungodly. Not true. This same belief (choice/sin) is held for transgender people. Also not true.
Sovereign Citizens: The belief that the United States government was secretly replaced and therefore all actions of the current state are illegal. “They believe that the replacement government swapped common law for admiralty law or maritime law.” * See also the Constitutional Sheriffs Movement.
Q-Anon: The belief that “the world is run by a secret cabal of pedophiles who worship Satan and are plotting against President Trump.” *
People who believe the earth is flat, that vaccines cause more harm than good, that the moon landing was a hoax, that the holocaust was faked, that germ theory is false, that evolution is incompatible with the evidence, that a race of reptilian aliens living in underground bases run the world, that Trump is an honest man trying to make America great (again).
And those are just a few of the more outrageous theories out there. But before any of us get too smug, we all hold beliefs that are unsupported by material evidence. We believe in prayer and ghosts and reincarnation and god(s) and multiverses and astrology and karma and prophecy and aromatherapy and inconsequential conspiracies like Muhammed Ali knocking out Sonny Liston with a ghost punch.
The Fundamentals of Belief
We need beliefs. They allow us to compartmentalize the world and get on with the business of staying alive. We simply have to believe in certain axiomatic fundamentals. A life of radical skepticism would be awful, annoying, and indistinguishable from insanity. For instance, we all believe the sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning. Few of us could intelligently explain the physics of why and there is the possibility (however small) that vast intergalactic forces could interrupt the earth’s delicate positioning in our solar system, disrupting the sunrise. However, we all live as if the sun’s reappearance is a given and we don’t challenge it. It’s just easier that way.
The point is we all hold a motley of unexamined beliefs because to not do so would jeopardize our ability to procure food, shelter, and community – the necessities of human life. These are the axioms that hold our sense of existence in sufficiently strong positions to let us give our attention to important shit like who will win The Bachelor or which Taylor Swift album is most germane to our own love lives.
Primed for Belief
The next thing to understand when it comes to why we believe what we believe is that humans are biologically primed to believe the positive claim rather than the negative claim. In other words, we tend to benefit more from trusting our suspicions than from questioning them. From an evolutionary perspective, if we hear a bump in the night it behooves us to take the potential threat seriously. Were we to ignore the noise and it turned out to be a tiger stalking us, we would be very dead. If we assume the noise is a threat and prepare to defend ourselves from a potential tiger attack, our chance of survival is greatly increased.
We evolved to trust our fear. And many of the weird beliefs people hold today can be traced to a sense of fear or powerlessness. We demonize the “other” (immigrant, foreigner, sectarian, race, caste, etc.) to ensure we are diligent in case they “attack”. Conspiracy theories, like Q-Anon, don’t posit that there’s a small cabal of prosocial humanitarians working behind the scenes to ensure our safety and health (it’s called OSHA by the way); the conspiracy always assumes ill will by bad actors – there’s always a tiger in the bush.
Secondly, we are evolutionarily primed to believe what those around us believe. Humans evolved in small tribal groups and survival of the individual and the ability to pass on one’s genetic material depended on staying in good graces with the tribe rather than being ostracized from it.
A good example of this is religious belief. The most important input for determining a human being’s religious affiliation is not divine revelation, not comparative religious study, not personal experience. It is simply the location of one’s birth. Born in India, you are far more likely to be Hindu than Jewish. Born in Saudi Arabia, you are far more likely to be Muslim than Christian. We are raised to believe what those around us believe and the stronger those beliefs are held by our community, the more likely we are to hold them stridently. And the more stridently we hold them, the more threatened we are by folk who believe differently. This is one reason why religion has been the source of so much bloodshed over the centuries (subject of future blathering, I’m sure).
This herd mentality and its kith and kin, the fear of social displacement, can be seen across all manner of cultural flotsam and jetsam. It can be found in political parties, in fashion movements, in musical tastes, in diets and fitness. It’s endemic to all human pursuit. We want to be in the in-group. We want the approval of our peers. It’s why college kids are so “woke” (hate that word, but what can you do?) and churches are regressive. The company you keep will tell you more about your belief system than almost any other factor.
Add to that, that in the modern world where tribes are fluid and diverse and open to new members, we seek out the tribes that align with the beliefs we already hold. And the Internet has made this far easier than ever before because we can join digital communities and ignore physical ones.
Entrenchment
So far we’ve covered (to an admittedly laughably rudimentary degree) why we are prone to believing anything at all and why it’s helpful to continue believing the things we are taught to believe. The final stage is why it’s so hard to change beliefs. We touched on that, of course, with fear of being ostracized from our communities and I believe that’s a huge one. But there’s a deeper psychological piece to the puzzle. It’s called Belief Perseverance. “Belief perseverance is the tendency to cling to one's initial belief even after receiving new information that contradicts or disconfirms the basis of that belief.” * There are a number of factors that contribute to this phenomenon.
Causal Thinking
We have all heard (or should have) the phrase “correlation does not prove causation.” It’s one of the great fundamental truths that, if properly adhered to, allows us to more deeply understand why the world is as it is. And yet!!!! And yet, we are rationalizing beasts and we often overestimate our abilities to tweeze out causation from causation. Which is to say, unless we really dig into a subject to understand it, we often just assume we already understand it, or rather, have a “rational” explanation for it. We’re primed to think we know why things are as they are.
[Sidenote #1: I hate to do it (I don’t) but this is one reason why a god belief is so prevalent. God is the ultimate cause. All things can be explained through a creator God and therefore nothing needs be investigated very deeply. We can sit comfortably in our understanding - God did it. And if God doing it seems weird (like brain eating amoeba) then we simply say “God works in mysterious ways.” No need for further inquiry, just the need for more heartfelt worship.]
Cognitive Dissonance
We want our world to make sense (we be rationalizing beasts) and we want to think we understand it (causal thinking) so when we are confronted with information that challenges our internal consistency, we get squirrely. To get rid of our feelings of discomfort, we simply reject the new information and double down on what we already believe. Being wrong is emotionally painful. So we opt into not being wrong by discounting any data that would make us so.
Confirmation Bias
Again, because we rationalize the way the world works, when we get input data that aligns with our current belief system, we notice it because it shows us to be right. It confirms our worldview. But, being the broken meat machines that we are, we are also prone to ignoring input data that doesn’t align with our current belief system. Our cognition simply fails to see it, thus we don’t need to account for it, and thus our current beliefs are not challenged. This is perhaps the most insidious element of belief because it’s hard to know what you don’t know – to account for what your mind refuses to even see.
Ego Defense
Anyone paying any attention to modern cultural debates understands how important identity is to our worldviews. Data that challenges our self identity threatens our very notion of self itself and thus must be dispatched post-haste. For me, the best example of this, writ large, is racial categorization. Biologically speaking, racial groups don’t exist. With genetic material we can understand that certain populations share certain traits, but there are no traits shared exclusively by our modern racial groups. For instance, there’s more genetic variation amongst Sub Saharan Africans than amongst all other global populations…and yet we (visually oriented humans) take a single phenotype – skin color – and declare it a category. Thus it becomes a socially constructed identity group and an identifier that individuals cling to because it has meaning socially. We invent it and then attribute all manner of import to it when in reality it doesn’t even exist. Back to ego defense – Try telling a white supremacists that the white race doesn’t exist and see how quickly they explode with invective, pseudo-science, and wrath. If your sense of self is dependent on certain beliefs, changing those beliefs force you to reinvent your sense of self and that’s a lot of work. And it’s scary. It’s far easier to cling to false beliefs than to reimagine who we fundamentally are. Plus, we already have communities that support our current sense of self. Is that a tiger in the bush? Of course it is!
Summation
So what have we learned? Probably not a lot, since my readership is (you are) highly intelligent and well educated. But let’s try to sum stuff up anyway just for shits and giggles:
Humans are primed to be fearful of threats
Humans are primed to assimilate with their in-groups
Humans are cognitively ill-equipped to relinquish the beliefs that make them feel safe and socially accepted
Put all that together and it’s easy to see that humans are primed to be manipulated by bad actors, bad information, and bad beliefs. Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, and Trumpist America all make more sense.
Worse yet, the Internet has flooded us with information overload and our lack of critical thinking skills (some because of educational deficiencies, but most because of cognitive deficiencies) has made our communities more susceptible than ever. There’s simply too much data to take in, we’re aware of too many things and we don’t have the time, bandwidth, or mental acuity to unravel all the threads and not be overwhelmed.
My father is one of the smartest people I know and his current thinking on MAGA Americans is that they are all “stupid and racist.” He knows they aren’t all stupid and racist, even if many are stupid and/or racist. But he’s mentally overwhelmed by all the stupidity and racism he’s seeing and so he retreats to a simple explanation. The problem is, if you call someone stupid or racist, you’re never going to change their beliefs. Ego Defense and Cognitive Dissonance will step in and make them double down on their stupidity and racism (or whatever other invective you hurl their way.)
So What Can Be Done?
Not much. Grab a bottle of whiskey and watch the world burn! No. I don’t think you should do that. That’s not gonna help anyone, least of all yourself. I think there are three things we can do:
Apply the socratic method when you meet people who hold beliefs that seem inane. Don’t tell them they’re wrong. Rather ask them questions that force them to justify their belief systems and let them set their own traps of logical fallacy and dissonance. You can’t logic them into better (more accurate) beliefs and you can’t shame them into better beliefs. Just ask them to explain why they believe what they believe and request that they use evidence to support their claims, rather than anecdote and emotion. Sounds easy enough. It isn’t. It’s hard. And it’s slow. And it’s frustrating. But it’s far more effective in the long term than argument or debate.
We need to create as big a tribal tent as possible so that belonging and community feels like a viable end state. From my perspective, this big tent can only be attained in our current political environment through class – the financially fucked vs. the financially empowered. There’s far far more of us than them and the evidence that they rig the system in their favor is legion. Billionaires and their minions are the tigers in the bush. We can worry about skin color and gender and god dogma and regionalism and political affiliation another day. For now, we need to coalesce under class populism and acknowledge that (to varying degrees) we are all being exploited by corporate capitalism. Safety in numbers requires numbers. Build coalition and don’t sweat the small stuff.
Be compassionate. Spread kindness as much as possible in your daily life. Make the people you meet feel as safe and respected as you can manage. Reduce the fear and anxiety we all experience in modern life by being non-threatening and/or affirming. You know – Jesus shit – turn the cheek and spread the love. That might feel naive in the face of current political trends. I get it. But again, this is about changing belief systems, not merely challenging them. People want a fight. Don’t give it to them. Just writing that made me question everything, seeing as how I’m fucking livid about our current situation and simply scared. I’m scared for our future. But so are they. So are they. And that’s the key here. The fascists are just scared and seeking safety in authoritarianism. There may be a time and place to fight them, but mostly we need to reduce their fear and give them hope that safety is attainable without blaming each other. Big tribe, big community.
Internets of the Day
Quote of the Week:
“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.”
– Robert M. Sapolsky
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The Good
Peeps: One of the reasons this newsletter was a bit late in arriving is that my social life has been super vibrant the past few weeks. Old friends in town, family in town, a potluck with childhood friends and families. Just a lot of visitors and connections, all of it soul refreshing and enervating. I am blessed with an incredible community of smart, kind, interesting people. Thankful for it everyday.
The Bad:
– Headlines: When you’re an unemployed copywriter born in the 1970s, the headline you might least want to read would sound something like this: The Gen X Career Meltdown. Well, fuck me.
The Ugly:
– Not today, folks: Not today.
Finally:
