On Belief

 

Most of us have to make decisions almost daily about what to believe. This is due to the fact that our modern world is too complex and multi-faceted to allow each of us to rely on personal experience or what happened in the past to support most of our beliefs. We cannot be everywhere, nor experience everything that requires us to make decisions—such as whether a virus is lethal, or whether the universe is really as big or particles as small as physicists say they are, or whether the evidence for global warming is really conclusive, or that human use of fossil fuels is really the cause, or whether government officials are right about a country that threatens us, and on and on. And so we, most of us, have to trust those who seem to have the credentials, the expertise, and/or the moral authority to inspire our trust. If they say something is true, we are inclined to believe that they are telling us the truth based on the best facts available. 

In most eras before ours, this problem of trust did not constantly arise. Most people believed that their past experiences could guide them in the future: that government representatives generally but not always told the truth, that scientists had no motive to misrepresent their discoveries, or that church officials like the Pope would prevaricate or could even be fallible. Now, however, we have all had to become more skeptical. I am of the opinion that papal infallibility is a joke. That when government officials swear that another government has threatened us—as in the alleged attack on our warships in the Gulf of Tonkin, or the possession of nuclear capability by Saddam Hussein—these officials often engage in elaborate lies to justify our pre-planned aggression. I am also personally skeptical of allegations about UFO sightings, or government collusion with the Arab terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center in 2001, or a host of other conspiracy theories. But that said, I, for the most part, do not believe that all government assertions are thereby false. That Covid-19 is a deadly and contagious virus seems beyond question to me, given the 600,000 deaths from it in this country, and the more than 4 million dead worldwide. Indeed, it seems to me that many governments, such as the one in India, have more reason to undercount the deaths from Covid than to exaggerate them. 

Why, then, do so many people vehemently disagree with the science, especially  as conveyed by government officials, and disagree with the idea that a vaccine could protect them against the worst outcomes from Covid-19? Why do so many Americans refuse to take recommended protective measures like wearing a mask? Why do nearly as many believe that global warming is a hoax cooked up by Democrats or by scientists looking for grants from government? Or that the moon landing in 1969 was not real but staged here on earth? 

Personally, I am mystified by this tendency to disbelieve almost everything emanating from government. On the other hand, there is a history to which we can attribute much of this skepticism, especially from the right side of the political spectrum. Though anti-government-ism actually started earlier, Ronald Reagan’s inaugural address in 1981 certainly cemented this conservative position when he famously said, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” One presumes that he did not mean, nor did people take it to mean, that all government activity was problematic (especially that which provides for corporate welfare); but his attack on government attempts to level the playing field through progressive taxation, or to regulate industries to prevent them from harming masses of people, or to provide a helping hand to those in need or those traditionally shut out of government largesse (like alleged “welfare queens”), was unmistakable. And the effects of this attack on government’s alleged “interference” and/or infringement on Americans’ so-called “freedoms” have had long-term effects. Nor would all this have had so lasting an effect without the underlying American ethic which holds that each individual is solely responsible for his/her own welfare, and that government’s only legitimate role is to protect the nation from harm originating outside our borders. In other words, to create a military that is so strong that no nation would even contemplate an attack (which position is, by its very nature, extremely profitable to the industries supplying weapons to that military). 

Of course, this is a position that ignores the mandate in the U.S. Constitution that government is also to see to the general welfare. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution states:

“The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide forthe common Defence and general Welfare of the United States”… 

 

This would seem to imply that the “general welfare” of  the United States could include anything that would be beyond the ability of individual citizens to afford or undertake, but is definitely in their best interests—from building roads and bridges and transit systems, to regulating industries with a monetary incentive to engage in harmful activities, to warning the public about broad dangers such as global warming, to making sure that buildings are built to withstand fire or sea rise, to helping sections of the country devastated by natural disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes, to maintaining public order on the roads and highways (with traffic lights and speed limits) and in cases of insurrection (such as the invasion of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021), and to more contentious tasks like making sure that every individual has the right to adequate healthcare, or adequate housing, or many more provisions that other nations take for granted as government mandates. Including writing a tax code that assesses citizens based not on the influence their wealth gives them in government, but with an eye to ensuring some level of equality of opportunity. 

And yet, we now have millions of citizens who refuse to abide by almost all government mandates that allegedly infringe on their “freedom.” The position goes as follows: ‘I am a free American and therefore no government can tell me to a) protect myself by getting a vaccination or b) protect myself and others by wearing a mask and staying away from large indoor gatherings, or c) credit the contention of government agencies that Covid-19, and its more transmissible variants, is really any more dangerous than the common flu.’ Despite current information that cases of the disease are rapidly increasing in places with low vaccination rates, that the pandemic is now a pandemic of the unvaccinated, these opinions have only hardened as cases spike and more people die. And as increasing infection rates from those refusing vaccination threaten to prolong the pandemic and infect far more Americans and people worldwide than ever before—in short, threaten the general welfare for which the government is indeed responsible, but which individuals, prating about their “freedom,” about their scorn for “government interference,” seem quite content to ignore. The idea seems to be: ‘To hell with others; no government can keep me from doing whatever I please.’ 

Why is this so? One would almost think that life itself were at stake for those who cling so stubbornly to such beliefs. And indeed it is, for if one’s belief that Covid-19 is not serious, or that vaccines have dangerous side effects and are the result of government plots, that belief literally puts one at risk of long-term debility or death. Similarly, if people believe that global warming is a hoax, despite the increasing occurrence of heat waves or storms that threaten our very existence as a species, then they will simply scorn government attempts to induce them to curtail their use of fossil fuels. How can we understand this? Psychology helps. For what seems to be the case is that beliefs literally become “impervious to the facts in a process psychologists call cognitive immunization” (Psychology Today, “A mind convinced is immune to logic,” Ekua Hagan, March 28, 2016.) Part of this process is that “our minds automatically neutralize clashing information” (ibid.) They also “avoid any information that contradicts a strongly held belief, while seeking out information that strengthens it” (ibid.). There are several other techniques that serve mainly to protect believers from outside challenges to their beliefs, including isolating themselves from those with different beliefs, anchoring one’s beliefs to powerful emotions, either negative (roasting in hell) or positive (bliss in heaven), and repeating one’s beliefs over and over. 

The question is, how or why did such elaborate techniques come about? Presumably through evolution. As psychologists now explain it, 

…minds did not evolve to evaluate what is or is not the truth. Our minds were equipped through evolution with an impulsion [impulse? compulsion? ed.] to create, transmit, and defend beliefs that are useful, whether true or not (ibid.).

 

That is to say, if a belief is useful to us, whether psychically or emotionally, it matters little whether it can stand up to the scrutiny of facts, or the opinion of others, or major authority figures. Or even, it seems, whether such a belief is helpful to our own health, or even deadly to the point of killing us. If we have somehow become convinced of such a belief, of its usefulness, it becomes literally “immune to logic,” or accuracy, or fact. 

So this is the serious situation we now find ourselves in. Most people now have all kinds of “alternative facts” about any issue or policy, conveniently available on the internet with the click of a key. They can also find allies on web sites to confirm their beliefs, often public figures who reinforce those beliefs, no matter how aberrant. We need only think of Donald Trump, the President of the United States, encouraging people who believed that the election was stolen to storm the Capitol on January 6, and stop the Congress from doing its Constitutional duty to certify Joe Biden as the winner. The horde of supporters then did exactly that (though they did not stop the certification process), breaking in and creating mayhem and death in the temple of democracy—all based on their delusional belief that the election had been stolen. That is to say, not even death or the threat of death can stop aroused people from acting on a cherished belief. It is one reason that governments at war try to instill in their troops the belief, often manufactured, that the enemy is the devil incarnate. Those who believe in the evil of the enemy and the righteousness of their cause can be led easily to suspend any civilized behaviors that would normally prevent them from the mass killing of strangers that war requires. Their beliefs insulate them from normal inhibitions. 

In sum, beliefs are powerful drivers of behavior, to put it mildly. And what we are learning more and more each day is that, contrary to what we might have thought, beliefs are not necessarily anchored in truth, or in fact, or in logic, or in the sought-out opinions of the best and brightest. On the contrary, they are often anchored in the flimsiest and most laughable assertions (think of the QAnon conspiracy theories about Hollywood stars sexually abusing and eating little children; or the recent rant by Britisher Kate Shemirani about Nuremberg-like trials where doctors and nurses could be hanged for administering the coronavirus vaccines), and/or in comforting emotions that, though useful to the believer, remain impervious to fact or logic or proof. And the saddest part is that we are all susceptible to these convenient and reassuring shortcuts because, again, no one in our time can test every belief in the annealing flame of personal experience. All of us, in the end, have to test our beliefs against whatever logic and research we can muster, and then rest them in whatever standard we have learned to trust. Or, in the final analysis, to whether we survive or perish because of them. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi 

Viruses Here, There and Everywhere

Viruses; viral growth. We’re surrounded by them these days. And it’s not just Sars and Covid-19 and all its variants like Delta that are spreading more rapidly and lethally by the day. It’s the viral growth of ignorance in the body politic, the viral growth of belief in what Hitler himself referred to as the Big Lie, the viral degradation of any received standard of truth. In short, we in the foremost democracy in the world are in trouble because of viral growth on both the physical and socio-mental level. 

            Take the virus that has already killed more than 4 million humans worldwide, and has now mutated into its most transmissable form yet, the Delta variant. This mutation developed when India was in the midst of its recent surge (a surge being an increase in cases that allows any virus to multiply infections and thereby have many more opportunities to mutate). This, in turn, means that the Sars virus and its mutations have demonstrated to all who can read or listen that the world is now irrevocably interconnected: what infects the people of India must soon come to infect the human population of every other nation on the planet. In short, no one is truly safe from this virus until everyone is safe, because no matter what percentage of Americans or Europeans gets vaccinated, there will be many who are not vaccinated or protected—as is now being demonstrated by the surging numbers of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in states like Missouri, Nevada and Mississippi, and in nations like England. Nor is this all. The surge of cases in African nations, and in Latin American nations like Brazil, means that new variants will likely emerge from those hotspots as well. And with new variants come new and increasing danger for the wealthier nations, even those that have high vaccination rates. For again, viral growth means that the chance that mutations will develop to circumvent the vaccines now protecting so many is increased. That is what viruses do, why they have survived for so long: they change in direct response to the weapons that humans marshal to cut them off. Thus, the more of them that find a human to infect, the more they can evolve variants to skirt around our evolving defenses. 

This physical threat from Covid-19 would be bad enough. But the socio-mental threat may be even more serious. For there are still people who simply deny the virus’s reality, like Linda Edwards from North Carolina: 

"I thought I was healthy enough and that I could escape it. Really, it was the most frightening thing I've ever been through in my life…It was devastating. I had no dreams of ever staying that long. It's the longest I've ever been in the hospital (two weeks)…I was there hoping and praying my son was okay here because he had tested positive, too… It's changed my whole life. I'll never be the same.” (www.rawstory.com, 7/13). 

 

Or this from the recent CPAC conference where idiots like Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado vowed fierce resistance to alleged nefarious government efforts to vaccinate, and thereby infect the population: 

“We’re here to tell government, we don’t want your benefits, we don’t want your welfare, don’t come knocking on my door with your Fauci ouchie,” Boebert said, referring to Biden’s top medical adviser, Anthony S. Fauci, her voice rising as she paced the stage and shook her finger. “You leave us the hell alone!” (Washington Post, “Vaccine hesitancy morphs into hostility,” 7/15/2021).

In response, veteran GOP pollster Frank Luntz, ominously observed: 

“Now decisions are being made not because of evidence or facts or statistics, but strictly on political lines. And now people are going to die.” (ibid). 

Or consider what has happened in a U.S. court recently. In the District Court in Michigan on July 12, Judge Linda V. Parker expressed her astonishment at the dozens of affidavits submitted by Trump lawyers as putative evidence of the vast conspiracy to fraudulently steal the 2020 presidential election from the former President. Calling the claims “fantastical,” Judge Parker went so far as to allege that “The court is concerned the affidavits were submitted in bad faith” (msn.com). Judge Parker was referring in particular to one affidavit claiming fraudulent collusion between Democratic election workers and Postal employees, an affidavit signed by someone who claimed to have seen “a young couple deliver several large plastic bags to a postal worker.” This witness said only that it was “odd” and that the bag “could be” ballots. Judge Parker’s comment on this affidavit is worth quoting in full:

“I don’t think I’ve ever really seen an affidavit that has made so many leaps. This is really fantastical. My question to counsel here is -- how can any of you, as officers to the court, present this type of affidavit? Is there anything in here that is not speculative?” (msn.com). 

 

It is important to emphasize Judge Parker’s words—that the Trump lawyers who presented the affidavit are “officers of the court,” that is, legal professionals, “having an absolute ethical duty to tell judges the truth, including avoiding dishonesty or evasion about…the location of documents and other matters related to conduct of the courts” (thefreedictionary.com). She clearly meant that these lawyers, including the infamous Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, had been derelict in their duty as court officers obliged to investigate and fact-check the claims made in their affidavits. Detroit attorney David Fink, referring to the “lies spread in this courtroom…that helped trigger the  deadly assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6,” suggested that all the lawyers involved should be punished. Judge Parker has suspended, to a later date, the question of punishment for this unethical behavior, but Attorney Fink made the important point that “these lies were put out into the world, and when they were put out into the world they were adopted and believed.” In other words, the lies submitted by lawyers, and of course by ex-President Trump, have had widespread and deadly consequences. 

This brings us to the source of these socio-mental viruses: Donald Trump, of course, who has brayed his outrage over his election loss (he calls it a steal) ever since November 2. But new reports from a book by Carole Leonnig and Richard Rucker assert that it was former-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani who actually initiated the Big Lie. The book, I Alone Can Fix It, reports that Giuliani had set up a separate “command center” inside the White House on election night, and when Fox News declared that Joe Biden had won Arizona, driving Trump into a profane frenzy, Giuliani tried to get the then-President to go on national television to deliver a victory speech. “Just go declare victory right now,” Giuliani is said to have told Trump, “You’ve got to go declare victory now.” In fact, Giuliani is reported to have been pushing the “Big Lie” all night long. When questions arose earlier that evening about the key battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, Giuliani is reported to have said to Trump aides, Just say we won. And that is exactly what Donald Trump began to do, and what he has asserted with varying degrees of vehemence and pretend outrage over “unfairness,” ever since.     

That Big Lie, in turn, has become a virus that has infected the entire Republican leadership, and virtually the entire Republican Party. From Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, to Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy, to the entire gaggle of spineless Senate Republicans, through Republicans in most State Houses, to the vast majority (74%) of Republican voters—all have echoed the Giuliani-Trump Lie: we was robbed. The election was stolen. Joe Biden is an illegitimate president. And some have even asserted (like pillow magnate Mike Lindell) that, despite the election results, Trump will be reinstated as President this August. The most rabid of Trump supporters, of course, took part in the invasion of the national Capitol on January 6, 2021. Driven by President Trump’s assertion in a speech earlier that day, they invaded the Congress in the attempt to “stop the steal”—that is, to prevent the U.S. Congress from doing its constitutional duty to confirm the results of the election, to wit, that Joe Biden had won and was the new President of the United States. Even to this day, after more than sixty lawsuits in several states have been dismissed by various courts as having no basis in fact, the majority of Republican voters believes, or seems to believe, that the 2020 election was marked by fraud, was somehow stolen, and that Biden is an illegitimate president. And they cheer wildly each time Donald Trump appears in public to re-assert his claim that the presidency was stolen from him. All with zero evidence. 

The question then becomes: what induces all these millions to believe the Big Lie? Indeed, what has led so many to believe all of Trump’s lies from the very beginning? It is, to quote Winston Churchill, a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Before the Trump era, one supposed that most Americans would base their ideas on facts—in this case, on the ruling of every court that fraud had nothing to do with Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, and, in the case of Covid-19, the reality that 4 million humans on the planet have already died, and that vaccines actually have been proven to help prevent infection and death. But none of these truths, also including the almost universally-accepted truth of climate change, all backed by evidence and statistics, seem to matter. People who are Trump zealots seem to believe that storming the Capitol to stop Congress from doing its duty was a reasonable action to take. That every indication that the election was fair and legitimate was “fake news,” or part of some monstrous plot by nefarious liberals/socialists. That widespread movements to stem the tide of virulent white supremacy have been fomented by some violent group called “antifa.” That their children are endangered by a secret cabal of Hollywood perverts who have secret orgies involving underage girls. That climate change is a hoax. And on and on. Nothing, it seems, is too outlandish to believe. And the only “proof” necessary is the loud and conspicuous outrage voiced by personalities on Fox News or some ridiculous Newsmax TV or radio program that pretends it is purveying not opinion (which it obviously is), but actual news (which it obviously is not). There is no longer a Walter Cronkite or a good housekeeping seal of approval” for real news as opposed to opinion, much less for “reality.” People seem to regard “alternate reality” as a perfectly legitimate category. And with the internet presenting every manner of twisted and fantastic “inside” scoop (opinion), the ability for the average person to sort through the information overload to focus on what has been vetted and more or less proven, has reached abysmally low levels. When added to the idiocy spouted by elected government officials—like Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, or Laurn Boobert (mispelling intentional) of Colorado, or Matt Gaetz of Florida, or even Republican Congressional leaders like Kevin McCarthy of the House or Mitch McConnell of the Senate—the partisan mix of lies and innuendoes becomes more than partisan. It becomes toxic. Toxic to the very bedrock notions of Democracy upon which this nation was founded, and which constitute its very DNA. For without an agreed-upon notion of what the Constitution mandates that the Congress do (such as verify the results of an election), or some minimal concept of proof concerning allegations of fraud, or the facts about a virus’s lethality or a vaccine’s prophylactic efficacy, a democracy—the government that responds to the legitimate will of the people—simply cannot function. That’s because the will of the people, of millions of people, becomes distorted, corrupted, and hostile to the very notion of a common good, to the concept that the people in its collectivity can be reasonable, and responsive to agreed-upon facts. Aside from the disagreements that always occur, and should occur, a democracy, that is, depends on the idea that a majority of a population will agree on the facts that appear to work for the common good, if not immediately, then over the long run. Without that minimal level of agreement, a democracy cannot function, but must descend to the level of dictatorship—where facts are mandated from above, where the agreement of the many yields to the forced obligation to accept the “truths” handed down by one powerful leader or group of leaders. 

That is the situation the United States now faces. Will we succumb, as the Republican Party seems to have succumbed, to the viral delusions of a single man insisting that only he is right, above the law, and the only one competent to make literal life-or-death decisions for millions? Or to the consensus of every reasonable court and opinion in the land that this imposter lost the election, that the Covid-19 virus is lethal, that vaccines to combat the virus do work, that climate change is real and human-caused and getting worse by the day? 

It is astonishing to me, and to many many others I know, that the fate of this nation hangs on the answer. 

Lawrence DiStasi