wierd things

                                     WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS

People believe things that are obviously not true, and should be seen as such after a few minutes of thought.  Why is this? One would think that anyone would want to only believe things that were true. The universe cares nothing for anyone’s opinion.  Facts are facts and no belief or opinion will change that. 
    I think there are a number of reasons for this.  I will list and try to explain some of them here.  First, what are some of the most wrong things that many people believe?
    First on the list must be religion.  Almost everybody believes in some sort of God.  Where does this idea come from?  Anthropologists and psychologists who have studied this phenomenon mostly agree that it come from our social organization, which evolved thousands of years ago.  Primitive people did and still do live in social groups such as families, clans, and tribes.  Prior to agriculture, everybody lived that way. In any group of mammals a leader will always emerge.  This is an evolutionary adaptation that helps maintain the cohesion of the group.  Once that idea of a leader or ruler, who is usually the oldest and strongest member of the group, arises then it is a short step to imagining a “super leader”.  Leaders protect the group and give them direction, and supply them with explanations of how their world works.  A god is simply an imaginary “super leader”.  Leader types quickly come to realize that their power depends on the belief of their infallibility by the group.  So it is to the leader’s advantage to have the group believe that he is getting his directions from a god, which only he and the witch doctor can communicate with. 
    Once people started living in cities it became possible for a leadership group to live without working.  Since the main goal of any ruler is to maintain his power, they will quickly learn the best ways to do this.  (The ones who don’t do so don’t remain leaders for long.)  Religion turns out to be one of the best ways ever devised for doing this.  God can watch and punish those who violate the rules set down by the ruler.  Since the god is omniscient and omnipotent there is no escaping from his judgment.
    As religion became more sophisticated, the rulers and priests devised even more effective measures for maintaining their power.  That’s when you get organized religions and the notion of the “divine right of kings”.  This has plagued humans for 10,000 years.  The promise of an afterlife where you will get all the things you deserved but didn’t get in the real world is very attractive for humans who have the capacity to imagine the future, and are afraid of death.
    This is a very simple explanation of religion, and there is much more to it.  But I believe that this describes the basic idea.
    The next class of weird things that people believe can be called “conspiracy theories”.  A conspiracy theory is a proposition that something is not what it seems and is really under the control of some malicious entity.  Such ideas are as old as humanity.  People believe in such ideas for a number of reasons.  First because of experience.  Everybody has been lied to by someone with power over them, starting with their parents.  This leads people to suspect that someone doesn’t want them to know the truth for some malicious reason.  Humans are designed to be curious and seek explanations for the world they see.  If they don’t get these explanations they try to devise them based on their own knowledge and experience.  But when someone doesn’t know the true facts of a matter, the explanation he comes up with is likely to be wrong.  This feeling that someone is trying to put something over on you is very uncomfortable, and you will try to relieve the feeling by creating an explanation.
    When more than one person is involved, the explanations feed on each other and become more and more involved and complicated.  Once the idea has spread, it will be found to be very satisfying to anybody who doesn’t know what is really going on and who doesn’t trust authority.
    Of course, the fact that authorities often lie and keep secrets for their own benefit doesn’t help the situation any.  But even when the facts are well known, many people will choose to believe whatever explanation plays most to their own assumptions and prejudices.  Once people become emotionally invested in an idea they become very resistant to change.  They come to see disagreement as a personal attack, and react accordingly. 
Most people are pretty ignorant of anything outside their own personal experience.  The cure for this is education, of course.  Unfortunately education in the United States is very lacking in a number of important respects.  A subject for another essay, perhaps.
    When people don’t know what’s going on they get anxious and uncomfortable, and naturally seek information.  When acceptable information is not forthcoming they will grab on to anything that relieves their feeling of impotence.  Thus, they become easy prey for any demagogue or self-interested conman.
    And again, once a person becomes emotionally invested in a position he is very hard to change.  The belief becomes part of his self-image and any disagreement is seen as a personal attack.  This is most easily seen in a Muslim’s reaction to anything he considers an attack on his faith.  But all believers have the same reaction to a greater or lesser extent. This is what makes unthinking belief so dangerous.
    Another class of erroneous things that many people believe is an ignorance of or misunderstanding of science.  This stems from deficient education and perhaps conflicting beliefs acquired from religion or culture.
    When I first started working in the education department at Ordway, I was completely amazed at the profound ignorance of the students about the simplest matters of science and how the world works.  I won’t catalog the misconceptions here, but only say they were universal and amazing.  I wrote many essays like this one for the GED classes, but it was a futile exercise.  Their ignorance was too deeply ingrained.
    Most people because of lack of proper education have a very limited understanding of science.  I’m not talking about scientific knowledge, though that is woefully lacking too.  I mean that people have no understanding of the principles of science, or the basic principles of logic and reason.  As a result they are able to believe things that anybody with a basic understanding science would know were not true or not likely to be true.  And because they don’t recognize these basic principles, it is almost impossible to explain or convince them that they are wrong.
    The result of this is conspiracy theories and things like creationism, environmentalism, and luddism in general.
    Few people understand what constitutes evidence and proof.  They are prone to all the logical fallacies.  For example, there is no logical reason to believe that a person’s expertize in one area confers similar expertize in another area.  Yet we often find athletes and entertainers pontificating on various matters completely out of their area.  There is no reason to pay more attention to a professor of English literature, even if he is famous for it, or works at Harvard, when he is talking about climate change than you would pay to any stranger on the street.  In fact, the stranger might actually know something about it, while the professor is only parroting what his colleagues have said.
    Also, the fact that any number of other people believes something is no evidence of its truth.  Truth is not a matter of opinion; even a lot of opinion.  Examples of this principle are all around us.  The foremost example is religion, as said before.
    Other areas of society are rife with ignorance and misconceptions.  Most people would say that the US is a democracy, for example.  Very few people understand how the government works; how laws are made, etc.  Even fewer people understand something as basic as money and finance.  I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
    In the end, what it comes down to is that people believe whatever makes them feel better, or feel vindicated, or safe, or better than others, or important and in control. Since they are usually none of these things they tend to be very defensive about their beliefs.
    The solution to this problem is simple in theory, and very difficult in practice.  JUST THINK!  The main difficulty is that most people have been failed by the education system, and have never been thought to think.  And make no mistake, thinking has to be taught.  No one is likely to figure it out by themselves.  There are many more ways of being wrong than ways of being right.
    Here are the basic principles:
    Learn what constitutes real evidence and demand it before believing anything.   
    Real evidence is not opinion, antidotes, hearsay, or “everybody” says.
Recognize and avoid wishful thinking.  Things exist as they are not how you would want them to be.
Nature, i.e., reality, is all there is.  Everything real is “natural” There is no supernatural anything.  No gods, no demons, no witches, no ghosts, no ESP, no sprits, no heaven and no hell (except the one we make for ourselves).
Magic does not work, and wishing will not make it so.  There is no such thing as a free lunch.  If you think something is too good to be true, you are probably right.

9/23/2012