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