the need for our beliefs to connect or respond to reality has become increasingly unimportant. We are free to believe literally anything, from the wildest alt-right QAnon political conspiracies to the wackiest Gwyneth Paltrow health-nut fantasies of the contemporary wellness movement. None of it really matters—the lights still come on in your house, your car still runs, the grocery stores remain stocked with food. As nanotechnology expert J. Storrs Hall puts it, humans have an enormous capacity to hold beliefs not because they are true, but because they are advantageous to hold.
Society functions best when people of high status are truth-seekers.
Potter’s new book is On Decline: Stagnation, Nostalgia, and Why Every Year is the Worst Year Ever. Have a nice day.
I’m in a business where truth literally should be the business; but people end up arguing at some length about ‘when’ the truth will matter – and this is essentially the problem of many economics issues – and religious issues, among other things. The question – well familiar to Jews through the ages – continues to be ‘How long will the wicked (wrong) prosper?’
The main question is not whether the truth ‘will out’ and triumph, but on what time scale. The more people presume that it will be revealed on an irrelevant time scale, the more they (even consciously) decide that the truth itself is irrelevant. They can both acknowledge and ignore it.
So the question is: do we have elites who are actually focused on an indefinite time scale? Are they thinking about distant generations and even eternity? Or are they living quarter to quarter, paycheck to paycheck, in a degree of uncertainty and status anxiety that renders long term planning pointless?
Can they afford the truth?
Tough question.
If I say I do not believe in superstitions, all good.
If I say the belief in God is a superstition….
The people responsible for keeping the lights on, building cars that run, and keeping grocery stores stocked with food do connect their beliefs to reality when it comes to performing those tasks. The arenas where beliefs are allowed to deviate from reality tend to be those in which all the costs and benefits of having correct or wrong beliefs do not accrue the believer. That describes collective decision making.
Note the phrase “because [false beliefs] are advantageous to hold”. It’s not advantageous to hold a false belief about building cars if that false belief leads my car company to go bankrupt. On the other hand, it could be advantageous to someone to believe a false conspiracy theory if doing so helps advance that person’s political aims even if the costs of such false belief accrue to others. This doesn’t describe very well why some people believe Paltrow’s health-nut fantasies, but I’m not sure that this type of false belief is very consequential at the societal level.
I think that Potter makes too many just so conclusions in his essay. For instance he mentions:
“Stagnation breeds authoritarianism. That, of course, is one of the great lessons of the 1930s, as the Great Depression drove diverse, democratic populations toward nationalism and into the arms of fascist dictators.”
I thought there were other more important factors at work during the GD that drove ‘fascism’: 1) Huge displacement of manual farm workers by machinery resulting in mass unemployment, 2) The economy *shrank* sharply not just stagnated, 3) Socialism was new and fashionable-lets’ check out the new variants that will solve all our problems, 4) Germany’s reparations for WWI, etc.
“because [false beliefs] are advantageous to hold”.
Not only “advantageous” but fun. Conspiracy theories provide a certain type of obsessive with hours of pleasurable occupation (I am not immune). Many parents believe it is more fun for children to believe that Santa Claus brings them presents rather than that the kids should know the truth.
I’ve taken pride and pleasure in the myths of pre-Howard Zinn American history, and willfully against all the evidence, still cling to them.
I also believe my wife is the most beautiful and desirable creature in the world and my grandson is the crown of creation.
When I was young, poor and unhappy, I believed that my condition was the fault of capitalism and its neglect of genius in favor of crass money making. This was also fun – too bad it didn’t survive contact with the real world.
The lights stay for a while during this rise of insanity.
More: holding, or pretending to hold, factually wrong beliefs may be beyond “advantageous” and rather “required for evolutionary success”.
As in, one who doesn’t believe, or pretend to believe, or perhaps simply hide disbelief, may find it impossible to procreate, to thrive, even to survive – depending on the belief, the time, the place.
Think about religion and various states throughout history, think about political views and any number of authoritarian regimes. Or the subtler rules in not-so-clearly-authoritarian regimes. (Ready to be “woke” for you HR job interview?)
For beliefs of little to no practical significance in daily life, the pressures will be staggering. So for example refusing to believe in evolution, may make it easier to procreate in some communities. And whether one believes it or not is largely irrelevent to anything of consequence.
Gwyneth Paltrow steaming her vag is largely famous as a joke or as a quasi-erotic bit involving a pretty actress. QAnon is famous largely as a device for left-wing writers to portray right-wing people negatively.
Kling promotes Jonathan Rauch who said that during the Trump era, “mainstream media, whatever its ideological priors, was in the bias-disconfirming business. It remained grounded in conventional journalistic norms.”… Oh boy… Talk about the “enormous capacity to hold beliefs not because they are true, but because they are advantageous to hold.”