An exploration of belief, unbelief, delusion, and critical thinking, and some (coping) strategies in dealing with this peculiarity of being human.
Humans can believe some pretty crazy things. Pew Research has at times found that 1% of Americans believe the earth is flat. And that 6% aren’t quite sure whether it is or not! In 2017, Peter McIndoe started a movement that claims the federal government has exterminated all birds and replaced them with look-alike drones to spy on citizens … a movement that now has 100,000 followers. In 1997, 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed joint-suicide in order to board Comet Hale–Bopp, which they believed was a disguised alien space ship that would take them to a beautiful new world.
As diverse as these movements are, they have a few features in common. The adherents collect their own data, make their own interpretations, and label any counter-evidence or counter-arguments as lies and conspiracies.
Sound familiar? The Kennedy assassination? The 9/11 plane crashes? Anti-vaxers and COVID19/measles? Global warming? Gender issues? Republicans and Democrats? Fundamentalist Christians? Young Earth Creationists?
This week, Scott and I discuss this quirky characteristic of humans. And we brought in a guest that we’ve had on more than once in the past — Doug Traversa — because he’s on “the other side” of Scott and me when it comes to the two most divisive of topics — religion and politics (he’s an American, and an atheist) — and yet he also has a long track record of modeling what Scott and I think is an excellent way to interact positively and respectfully with others who think very differently from him.
First, we explored the diverse manifestations of this human characteristic of dismissing evidence and explanations from qualified experts and replacing them with their own. The list is too long — and too distressing — to repeat here.
Then we identified a number of contributing factors, because you can’t fix a problem if you don’t fully understand it. Here are some of the ones we found:
- isolationism, social bubbles, echo-chambers and silos
- home-schooling
- pledges of allegiance, shibboleths, creedal statements
- control of books that can/cannot be read; people who can/cannot be listened to or associated with
- “the algorithms” of social media
- people intentionally or unconsciously creating their own algorithms (choosing the news media they listen to; the way they do Google searches)
- being selective in the attention we give to the reasons for/against something
- we’ve lost the ability to identify authoritative people, credentials
- lost the ability for critical thinking and reasoning
- Postmodernism: no absolute truth; people speak of “my truth” versus “your truth”
- self-fulfilling reasoning and confirmation bias
- peer pressure
- cognitive traits inherited through our long evolutionary journey
- herd mentality (which plays into our tribalism)
- primates need to be in-group, and fear social isolation (the rationale behind jails and prisons)
- need to be suspicious of outsiders (plays into our racism)
- software that tries to make sense of a limited data-set in order to create a simplified user-friendly version of reality (even if that only fits some of the data points, and forces us to reject the other data points)
Finally we talked about our responses to this:
- don’t blame, mock or demonize them …. we’re ALL just running limited data sets through clunky software on patch-work hardware
- read more broadly; ask more questions; validate your assumptions and suspicions
- despair … if humans can believe such diverse and often mutually exclusive ideas — and be fully convinced that THEY have the real truth — then how can I be so confident that what I believe is true?
- become more comfortable with uncertainty
As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …
If you want to learn more about Doug, check out our episodes in which he tells his full life-story, or why he decided to give up his faith, or get his views on the Richard Dawkins / Ayaan Hirsi Ali interview.
For episodes that are closely related to this topic, check out what we said about science denial, or a collection of episodes that focus on Evangelicals.
Episode image is a modified still image from the 1999 block-buster film The Matrix.
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