HYPOCRISY FOR BEGINNERS
AUTHOR’S NOTE: If you are already an advanced hypocrite, you could save time by skipping to the next section.
The verb “to believe” has two forms. The first is “I believe that . . .”. If you start a sentence using these words, you tend to complete it with a statement of fact – something that either can or cannot be backed up with evidence.
The other form is “I believe in . . .”. Start a sentence with these words, and you end it with a concept or something that cannot be empirically supported. For example, “I believe in freedom of speech.”
What is noteworthy about the “I believe that” form is its clarity. Two people will almost never have an argument that starts with one of them saying, “I believe that” because the matter can usually be settled with a demonstration of fact. They conduct an investigation or experiment, and one is forced to accept that they were misinformed. Sometimes, the empirical demonstration presents practical difficulties; for example “I believe that there is an afterlife” is theoretically demonstrable but no one has yet managed it. Practical difficulties also exist in science. For example, physicists are limited because although they can measure the precise location or speed of a sub-atomic particle, they cannot measure both at the same time – a problem known as the Uncertainty Principal.
Start a conversation with “I believe in the American Way” and there will ensue a screaming argument where the only conclusion is that each person thought “the American Way” meant something completely different. The funny thing is that the end result is that the understanding of “the American Way” is left entirely unshaken by an hour of shouting. In fact, it is likely that each position might become more entrenched after the debate.
This is the problem with concepts. We can never be sure that two people understand it in the same way because concept words are intended to summarise very complex sets of beliefs.
Ronald Reagan, “The Man Who Beat Communism”,147 persuaded Gorbachev to believe in capitalism and free-market ideology. However, Reagan (not exactly a detail man) forgot to mention to Gorbachev that capitalism and free markets did not function without the control of contract law or company law. Not only that, but they also needed a regulated securities market, a stock exchange, properly capitalised and regulated banks and insurance companies, a progressive tax system, educated consumers, and trade associations; not to mention the need for laws to prevent monopolies, money-laundering, price fixing, pollution and deceiving consumers.
The old Soviet world had none of these things. Whoops!
Sadly for Russia, the old communist system was abandoned in 1991 before the essential capitalist infrastructure could be put into place. The result was perhaps the greatest asset-stripping exercise in the history of mankind. Russia’s new magnates bought everything from factories to oil reserves at prices fixed by the remnants of the Soviet government, and sold them at market prices. A few men became spectacularly wealthy overnight. Russia was not a wealthy country at the time, but over the next two decades it sprouted sixty-two billionaires.148 The ideological vacuum between Soviet communism and Western capitalism that created these opportunities for enrichment also made holding on to your wealth a bit tricky. Result: most of Russia’s wealth was stripped and relocated overseas – to England, Switzerland and other piggybank countries.
The point to take from this tragic story of Russia’s journey from communism to Reagan’s capitalism is simple: if you say you believe in capitalism you don’t actually need to say what it is that you believe at all. What you believe in is a word – a simple little word. The fact that that word encompasses a whole system of interrelated beliefs and complex thoughts gets swept under the carpet.
This avoidance of the complexity that underlies the word is often a deliberate form of denial. Perhaps this was the case with Reagan. The American cold warriors might say that Reagan caused the total collapse of the Soviet Union because he skipped the details. A more recent example is Barrack Obama, who ran for President of the United States under the slogan “Change We Can Believe In”. He swept up a whole generation of voters, and the very vagueness of the slogan meant that he had already captured these voters before he had to bother with actual policies.
This avoidance of detail, this assumption that everybody knows what a concept word means, goes on generation after generation. After a time, the original meaning creeps imperceptibly from something once clear and precise to something completely different. We can call this “belief creep” and it happens all around us.
Take “I believe in Christianity” as an example. One man’s teaching is written into a book 2,000 years ago, and today the followers of his teaching are as diverse as the Amish of America’s mid-west and the Pope in Rome. A Tibetan Buddhist and an Afghan Muslim may practice different religions but end up living their lives in very similar ways, but Christians like the Amish and the Pope who practice the same religion live very differently. The teachings of Christianity include humility, so surely nobody who claims to follow these teachings could credibly go to a Christian service in anything more elaborate than an Amish horse-drawn buggy. So what justifies the pomp of the Vatican? Christianity also preaches pacifism. Why then has so much war been waged in its name? The Bible is full of contradictions – in some parts preaching peace and in others recommending smashing children against rocks.149
Not to be outdone, Islam has been an equally rich source of belief drift. It started before the body of the Prophet Mohammed was cold in its grave with the split into Sunnis and Shias, and to this day Islam continues to sprout new sects.
What of political ideology? Thirty years or so ago, it was not so unusual to find people in Europe who called themselves communists while wearing Armani suits. This seems completely incongruous now, but is it any more incongruous than the Cadillac Christians of America?
So, concept words are necessary because they encapsulate compound beliefs. But is belief drift unavoidable?
The only way to be sure that you are avoiding belief drift is to translate your “I believe in” statements into “I believe that” statements. However, the more belief drift that your understanding of a concept has accumulated, the harder it is. For example “I believe in capitalism” could be translated into “I believe that if the owners of capital are allowed to deploy it in ways that suit their own interest and to retain the returns for themselves, that the broad wealth of society will ultimately be enhanced.” And immediately you will say, “Yes, but . . .” Like Reagan’s vision, this “belief that” statement still skips necessary detail – we return to the problem of desummarising a concept word.
Religious concepts tend to be particularly prone to belief drift. This is mainly because many of the concepts are very old and first appeared when people lived in a very different way. So, for example, I could translate “I believe in God”, into “I believe that there is a moral metabeing who blesses America whenever I ask him to.” At which point, all Canadians wonder if God is racist.
Clearly, another contentious point is that the phrase “I believe in God” means that God is a concept and not a thing or person. If I say that I believe in Osama bin Laden, I am not saying that I believe that the man physically existed. George W. Bush believed that Osama B. Laden existed (sadly for both of them). Saying that you believe in him means that you subscribe to a system of beliefs that the name represents – and this is conceptual. George W. Bush certainly did not believe this.
The translation process is not all one way. Sometimes we can translate a “believe that” statement into a “believe in” statement. By playing with words, we can conceptify a fact or can factify a concept; for example, “I believe that the Earth is round” can be conceptified into “I believe in the idea of a round Earth”. However, we have to be careful when we are dealing with facts about concepts; for example “I believe that there is hope for mankind” refers to a fact about a concept that is literally true if someone is merely doing some hoping. However, this is not what the statement is generally taken to mean, but rather that the believer thinks that mankind’s future will work out OK and it isn’t entirely clear whether this is a fact or a concept. The more commonly accepted meaning of the expression would perhaps be better expressed “I believe in the future of mankind.” This, of course, is a conceptual statement.
So, believing in is intended to encapsulate whole complex conceptual thoughts, but ends up just being something that happens in your head. Believing in is thought-fluff. Nobody gets to look in your head to see what is going on. What is happening in your head is what we’re aiming to explain.
“To believe” is not the only word that has two forms; one that rests on solid foundation and another that rests on thought-fluff. How about “to wage war against . . .” and “to wage war on . . .”? When you wage war against, you actually know what you are doing, and what would constitute victory. When you wage war on, you never know whether you have won or lost. The objective is a concept, generally which nobody bothers to define.
The term “War on Terror” was coined by a man for whom thought-fluff was something to be proud of. Nobody asked what it meant because we were in shock following the 9/11 attacks. With the benefit of hindsight, it now clear that the “War on Terror” is a war against a belief system. Whichever way you look at it, there is an undefined concept in there. And nobody understands how the belief propagates. Put this way, it is doubtful that anyone in the Pentagon would think it winnable by military means; hence all the crude fumbling about “hearts and minds” – that demonstrably never changed anybody’s beliefs. Part II of this book demonstrates how beliefs in propagate. You can’t change someone’s beliefs by bombing them, and being nice to them won’t work either. All belief in is something other than what the believer thinks it is.
Consider the term “War on Iraq”, and ask yourself why World War II wasn’t a war on Germany or on Japan. In the latter case, we knew what the objective was, so it was a War against. When it ended there was a treaty and a victory parade and all the soldiers went home. With Iraq, we never knew who we were supposed to shoot so we called them terrorists after we shot them, and the conceptual aim was crudely reinvented as we went along (weapons of mass destruction / regime change / establishment of democracy / etc).
Wars against have definite end points, whereas wars on never end, they just fade out with an embarrassed cough, when it gradually dawns on everyone that the objective was conceptual, and nobody understood the concept.
Consider the War on Drugs, which could be a momentous instantaneous victory if we simply made a clear decision to stop fighting it. If we legalised drugs, we could tax them heavily and use the proceeds to fight the War on Poverty.
And for our final example of thought-fluff in action, consider the verb “to care”! The two forms are “to care for . . .” and “to care about . . .”. Caring for is real, but caring about is just thought-fluff. If you care for your elderly mother, this is demonstrable in fact: every day you go around to her house and make sure she is eating properly and has remembered to take her pills. If you care about your mother, she is not likely to show you much gratitude. For that reason, you might actually tend to avoid her. So caring about somebody might actually make it less likely that you will care for them. But the wonderful thing with caring about is that it feels so good.
Try this at your earliest convenience: Settle down in your favourite armchair and pour yourself some 1990 Château Pétrus into your finest crystal glass. After you have spent a moment or two considering its bouquet, you will be ready to commence caring about the poor. Savour the moment! While letting the mellow richness of the Château Pétrus roll over your tongue, feel the warmth that flows from all that caring.
Of course, there may be some miserable killjoys who say “yes, but you don’t really care about the poor.” How do they know? Caring about is thought-fluff: It only happens in your head, and nobody else gets to look in there.
Having experienced the hum of good karma that comes from caring about the poor, you will no doubt want to share your moment of rapture. Get one of those coiled ribbons – a plastic one (in red naturally) that says on it “God bless poor people” and stick it on the back of your SUV. (Don’t do this on your Bentley because that would be tacky.)
Now that you are giddy with the feeling that comes from caring about, you will no doubt want to get another plastic ribbon (in green of course) that says “Save the planet!” You could put this on the back of the SUV too. Put it just above the exhaust pipe! Then you could take the empty Château Pétrus bottle to the recycling depot. Wait a minute! You have been drinking and you really care about road safety, so send the butler. While he is gone, you can spend more time caring about the poor.
When you are sober again, you can drive around your neighbourhood and people will see the ribbon stickers on the back of the SUV, and they look at you admiringly: “There is a man who really cares”, they will think. And the wonderful thing; the thing that just completes how fabulous caring about makes you feel, is that you won’t actually have to do anything that could vaguely be called work.
BELIEF AND THE PROBLEM OF PERSPECTIVE
Edward Said’s book Orientalism150 is a defining work in cultural studies. An Orientalist, he explains, is a Westerner who believes in the inferiority of Oriental people. Much of the detail of his argument centres on the creation of the orientalist beliefs about Arabs. These beliefs were self-servingly created by European colonial powers seeking to conceal their selfish interests under a cloak of morality. However, what is shocking is that it originated in scholarly research that was considered to be objective and was often exhaustingly thorough. Such beliefs, Said claims, were reinforced by people who were considered to be champions of the downtrodden.151
Perhaps the simplest evidence that Said’s argument is correct is to consider the expression “Anti-Semitic”. It is accepted that a Semite is a person who speaks a Semitic language and this includes Jews and Arabs. But the expression “Anti-Semitic” means “hostility to or prejudice against Jews”. Arabs are not included. Go on – check your dictionary! It would appear that hostility to or prejudice against Arabs is so culturally accepted, that it has shifted the meanings of the words.
Orientalism is a hugely influential book, but Said is not without his critics. So fixated is Said on the negative beliefs of Westerners regarding Orientals, that he fails to acknowledge that many subgroups of Orientals have negative beliefs about each other that cannot be attributed to Western influence. I have a concern that a Westerner cannot criticise Said without being accused of being an Orientalist himself. To attack him and avoid this criticism, it is necessary to be an Oriental.
V.S. Naipaul is an acclaimed novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He expressed his counter-argument to Said in his non-fiction writing. Naipaul wrote a trilogy of books on India that documented his travels there between 1962 and 1990.152 He also wrote two similar books on the Islamic World.153 These books are brutal in their honesty.
Naipaul’s argument is that Indian inferiority is not a Western myth, but is a fact that results from Indian religious belief. He does not soften his language; for example referring to “India’s intellectual secondratedness”.154 His argument is that the caste system of Hindu belief traps Indians and prevents their development. The caste system designates a man’s occupation at birth, and has resisted all attempts at reform. It is at least as old as the Bhagavad Gita – the Hindu “manual for mankind” that was written between the fifth and second centuries BC. Many of India’s newer religions split from Hinduism as an attempt to escape the caste system (e.g. Jainism and Sikhism). It demarcates in ways that are hardly perceptible to a foreigner but are obvious to an Indian. For example, the “husbands wanted” and “wives wanted” ads in Indian newspapers always include the poster’s family name, because this enables readers to determine the poster’s caste. Marriage, even today, almost always occurs between people of the same caste. Caste marks can include the way a beard is cut or a turban is worn; and caste denotes occupation that could be priest or latrine cleaner. For example, the Dhor is a sub-caste group that has the role of disposing of dead cattle and running tanneries, and it is almost inconceivable that a Hindu from another caste would consider performing this function. Naipaul quotes from the Bhagavad Gita “ ‘And do thy duty, even if it be humble, rather than another’s, even if it be great. To die in one’s duty is life: To live in another’s is death.’ ”155 So caste locks a Hindu man into an occupation for life. Self-improvement is therefore forbidden by religion: the talented latrine cleaner remains a latrine cleaner, and the inept priest remains a priest.
The effect of the caste system on the execution of necessary work is interesting: Naipaul describes four men sweeping the steps of a Bombay hotel. After they finished, the steps were still filthy.
You cannot complain that the hotel is dirty. No Indian will agree with you. Four sweepers are in daily attendance, and it is enough in India that the sweepers attend. They are not required to clean, that is a subsidiary part of their function which is to be sweepers.156
Since they cannot escape sweeping except in the next life, they sweep floors in the ritually correct way, and the objective of the function is irrelevant.
Class is a system of rewards. Caste imprisons a man in his function. From this it follows, since there are no rewards, that duties and responsibilities become irrelevant to position. A man is proclaimed his function.157
Said and Naipaul have beliefs that are almost exact opposites. This is inevitable because they have perspectives that are also uncannily exact opposites: Said (a Christian Palestinian Arab) was raised in the culture he defends and then moved to a society that considers that culture irrelevant (the USA); Naipaul (an atheist of Brahmin Hindu Indian origin) was raised in a society that considers his culture irrelevant (Colonial Trinidad) and then travelled extensively in the culture he attacks.
Said accused Naipaul of being a neo-colonial apologist. However, this is unjust because little in Naipaul’s work even concerns the colonial period. Said might accuse Naipaul of being an Orientalist himself, but Naipaul’s origins make him as close to culturally stateless as it is possible to be. Would Said similarly accuse Mahatma Gandhi of being an Orientalist? Gandhi could see what was wrong with India because he was (like Naipaul) an outsider. He could see that there was something wrong with members of one caste eating alone to avoid being polluted by the sight of other castes. Similarly, he understood that it was wrong to use the veranda as a latrine, not thinking about whether someone of the caste designated to clean up excrement was present.158
Whatever the merits of each position, Said must be considered the victor in this debate in the West. We have arrived at the point where everyone is so terrified of being accused of racism that all we can say of other cultures are a few insipid remarks with a vapid positive spin. No Western academic would dare say that the people of another culture were intellectually second-rate in any scholarly journal. Even Naipaul’s own publisher sides with Said: The blurb on the back of my copy of India: A Wounded Civilization says Naipaul had “a conviction that India, wounded by centuries of foreign rule, has not yet found an ideology of regeneration” – in other words it is the fault of foreigners that India is a mess, which is not what Naipaul is saying. He is saying that India cannot fix itself because Indians have self-destructive beliefs that predate foreign rule. Naipaul’s own publisher seems to think it has to “de-Orientalise” its own author on the back of his own book. However, there is little doubt that Naipaul has won the debate in the East. Indians are paranoid about China’s regional ambitions. China took Indian territory by force in 1962, and appears to be biding its time before further subjugating its neighbour to the South. Surprisingly, Naipaul also has considerable acceptance in India, despite his devastating criticism. You can buy his India trilogy in almost every English language bookshop in the country.
So what can be added to this debate?
There is little point trying to arbitrate between Said and Naipaul. Since their opposite views arise from opposite perspectives, what needs to be done is to eliminate the problem of perspective. In the real world this is not possible because we think our own beliefs are true – that is what belief means. When someone studies the beliefs of another culture, they are bound to misunderstand certain critical elements. All global conflict is driven by incompatible beliefs that derive from differing perspectives. To eliminate the problem of perspective, it is necessary to consider beliefs as an entirely abstract concept. In this way, one can explore how a self-destructive belief can arise without getting into the messy business of considering whether it is true or not. By ignoring the rightness or wrongness of beliefs their structures can be examined and explanations deduced as to why they are believed.
In Part I, I constructed atomic-level models of how emotional behaviour determines human action, by creating hypothetical people, each of whom had only one emotion, and each of whom was exposed to a systematically distorted behaviour pattern relating to that emotion. Using a series of interrelated thought experiments, I demonstrated that humans derive their self-destructive actions by a rational process. In Part II, I will place these idealised hypothetical people into a hypothetical society – one that (unlike the world of Said and Naipaul) has no culture and no history. I will construct a complete set of beliefs for these hypothetical people. But it isn’t enough to simply invent beliefs; I must be able to demonstrate that they would be believed. This is an exercise in logic. I will do this by constructing a hypothetical system of perception, where the individual is trapped and unable to see that he is in a trap.
SCENARIO: THE GENERIC C/D IDEOLOGY
The Man lived in a world where everybody believed in the Way. Many centuries ago, the Sage had explained that the Way would create human wellbeing. Initially, people followed the Way because they understood the reasoning of the Sage and thought it made sense, but gradually people stopped bothering to read the writings of the Sage, and so they started to forget them. They continued to think that they believed in the Way, but, through belief drift, the ideology changed and with it their way of living. They convinced themselves that they believed the Way by gradually starting to act out their wellbeing to demonstrate compliance.
The Man wondered – how was it that the Way made the people happy? The people in the Man’s world would admonish him, and say “you cannot be happy because you do not believe in the Way”; so the man was left doubting himself. He wanted to be happy. Not believing the Way meant that he was in danger of being an outsider in his own world, and he wanted to belong; so he decided to believe. But how could this be done?
He consulted one of the elders – someone whose belief in the Way could not be doubted. The elder told him that if he accepted the Way in his heart, that happiness would come to him. The man went away. He wasn’t sure what “accepting in his heart” meant, so he acted out the belief: he affected the happiness that he was taught came from the Way, and gradually he became comfortable with this, and then it became a habit. Once it became habit, he believed in his happiness and he assumed that his happiness came from believing the Way. It had to be true that believing in the Way caused happiness. This had become irrefutable to him.
In a normal world, circumstances cause feelings, and they are expressed to others through behaviour. We observe the behaviour of others, but cannot see the feelings themselves. Normally, we can study the causal relationship between the body language of others and the circumstances that cause it. We can replicate these circumstances in our own lives and thereby create the feeling in ourselves. The body language of others is therefore essential for us to be able to find a path to our own happiness. For this to be a reliable path to happiness, it is necessary that everyone’s path is similar. It is also necessary that everyone’s behaviour is an accurate reflection of what they feel.
In the Man’s world, everybody who believes in the Way affects happiness habitually. They act happy because belief drift has gradually transformed the Way into a belief system where people act out their happiness to demonstrate ideological compliance. Once this occurs, it no longer matters what it is that they are complying with. They also do this to ensure other people’s acceptance. There is no connection between a true inner feeling and the outer expression of happiness. The habitual affectation of the outward signs of happiness has the effect of changing the actual meaning of the word “happiness”: the word refers to whatever causes the outer expression of happiness, and now what causes this is the belief system that the people call the Way.
Happiness isn’t a feeling in the Man’s world, it is a belief in a feeling: a self-belief that is both individual and collective. However, there is circularity here: believers in the Way habitually act happy, but happiness is not a feeling, it is a belief – a value. But happiness must be good; this is emotionally axiomatic. And the happiness is caused by the Way. How then is it possible to question the goodness of the Way? The Way is therefore True, and in the Man’s world this is irrefutable. So the Man believes in the Way, despite the fact that he (like the writer and readers of this Scenario) doesn’t know what the Way actually is. He believes in an ideology without needing to understand its content.
IRREFUTABLE UNTRUTHS
In arithmetic, the double negative is equal to the positive; so the negative of minus one is plus one [ --1 = +1 ]. In formal logic, the double negative is also equal to the positive: something that is not true is false, and something that is not false is true, so it is clearly the case that something that is not not true [ ~~T ] is true.
Irrefutability is a special case of the double negative: a refutation is a demonstration that something is false; and if something is irrefutable, it is impossible to demonstrate that it is false – so it is presumed true. If a thought is irrefutable, then to the person who has that thought, it must be true. It is therefore a belief because the believer cannot refute it. The only way it can cease to be a belief is for it to be forgotten, but then it isn’t a thought anymore. So, an irrefutable thought is always a belief.
Irrefutability in this context is not simply a concept of logic. To understand this you need to understand that the Scenarios in this book are not simply stories. They are an unusual type of thought experiment that use dramatic irony to set up a hypothetical individual or group of individuals who are obviously operating under a misconception of which they have no awareness. They permit the exploration of rationality in hypothetical minds where words and concepts have become misunderstood. This book is an attempt to put together a set of such Scenarios that accounts for all the strangeness of humanity.
Understanding the phenomenon of belief is important because it is what motivates people to put children into gas chambers and fly jet aircraft into skyscrapers. It would be nice if we could ignore all the good beliefs (which you no doubt think are yours) and only look at the bad beliefs (i.e. everybody else’s) but nobody can separate good beliefs from bad ones until we can look back at their devastating aftermath. If you think you don’t need to care about your carbon footprint, it is possible that your beliefs are more destructive than Hitler’s or bin Laden’s. By ignoring the distinction between good and bad, we can look at belief as a totally abstract concept. This involves suspending the idea of truth, which would seem appropriate since general observation of humanity makes it pretty clear that humans can believe in anything and can do it on a global scale.
Truth is for wimps, and we have to look at belief as a truthindependent human phenomenon.
I am seeking to demonstrate that there is a logical mechanism to beliefs that makes them irrefutable to the believer. I also intend to demonstrate why different people believe completely different things: if a word for an emotion is derived from the behaviour associated with that emotion, and each of us lives in a slightly different behavioural environment, then emotion words have subtly different meanings for each of us. Therefore, a thought may be irrefutable to one individual, but not others who may express the thought in exactly the same words. Hence a belief can be unique to a single person.
I am specifically seeking to explain why a person has a belief in. Belief that derives from information that is empirically observable, and incorrect belief that derives from misinformation or misinterpretation of empirical evidence. It would be misguided to say that a belief in that is simply a behavioural construct is false. In fact it doesn’t really make much sense to say that a belief in anything is actually correct or incorrect. What I hope to demonstrate is that such a belief is almost inevitably going to be something entirely different to what the believer thinks it is.
Let us consider an example: George W. Bush talked of “good and evil”. But his antagonist Osama B. Laden talked of exactly the same thing. War between them was inevitable because their definitions of good and evil were opposites of one another: they each thought the other evil. To consider this, we first need to suspend our judgement of which was right and look objectively at the causality of belief. (This is easier if you think neither of them was right.) Each of them had irrefutable thoughts that were irreconcilable with the other. We cannot understand this while our own beliefs stand in the way.
Likewise, capitalism and communism are both believed by their proponents. This too needs to be explored objectively. (Again, this is easier if you think they are both busted ideologies.)
Let us assume for now that your religion is The-One-TrueReligion. Is it not reasonable to ask why most of the rest of our species practices a false one? Wars almost always occur between people of different religions (although they usually pretend another cause). If someone with a false religion is going to declare war on you, don’t you think that you ought to attempt to understand why? You cannot do this objectively if your own religious belief stands in the way. It might actually be some other belief of yours that is the problem, or it may simply be that your beliefs are incompatible with someone else’s.
For you, the reader, this is difficult because if I am to look at the causality of belief in, then it raises questions about your own beliefs, including the possibility that they are all merely behavioural constructs. If you are not ready to question some of your own beliefs in a harsh light (whatever they might be) then perhaps you might at this point choose not to read on.
While the thesis of Part I is that self-destructive actions are rationally derived from manipulated behaviour associated with emotional states, the thesis of Part II is that belief in is derived from exactly the same thing. Therefore, all belief is likely some sort of misconception. In Part I we encountered false beliefs. For example, the abused woman in Scenario A believed that the feeling she felt when the man grabbed her arm was love, when in fact the feeling was fear. This of course is an incorrect belief that although one that is rather uniquely difficult to empirically demonstrate, which as it turns out is the key to the problem of belief in. It is crucial that we keep in mind the distinction between believing that and believing in because, if I am to demonstrate that believing in derives from a circularity of causality, we have to be sure that the entire theory in this book does not derive from a similar logical dysfunction. Believing in this book would be a rather grand tautology, so I want you to believe that this is really how beliefs in actually work. For this to become science, we would then need to demonstrate that empirically. This is technically possible if we can demonstrate over time that behaviour changes over time as ideology shifts, and we can see this when opposing ideologies are forced to confront one another at moments of history like the Berlin Wall coming down.
To understand why believing in derives from behaviour let us analyse the previous Scenario Generic C/D ideology: This Scenario is a combination of Scenario C and Scenario D reconfigured as a belief system. Scenario C explains that if someone affects the behaviour of an emotional state it makes that person unable to correctly identify the presence of the feeling in themself. Scenario D explains that when other people affect such behaviour, it creates false beliefs in the causality of feelings, i.e. beliefs in feelings where the feeling is not actually present. An ideology requires collective belief, so the distinction between the first person and the second/third person disappears because everybody is acting together. The Generic C/D ideology is a logical tautology – it derives from circular causality as follows:
Following this causality, we create an irrefutable thought that is a trap resulting from a feedback loop involving a misconception of an emotion. Clearly, nobody thinks that this is how their beliefs work, but belief is like a magic trick – once you have been shown how it works, it isn’t magic anymore. That a belief constructed this way is self-destructive is not immediately obvious. But most human emotions evolved by natural selection as drivers of survivalenhancing actions. So, if belief causes systematic alteration of emotional behaviour, it leads to collective suboptimal actions, and hence ultimately both self-destruction and an impediment to our species’ survival as a whole. To explore this, I will invent political ideologies devoid of any politics (for example the Generic C/D ideology), and then I will invent religions devoid of any theology.
The Generic C/D ideology is believed because its believers think it causes happiness – i.e. positive emotional states. But human wellbeing can also be defined by the absence of undesirable emotional states, and so we can also construct a generic ideology derived from Scenarios A and B.
SCENARIO: THE GENERIC A/B IDEOLOGY
AUTHORS NOTE: apologies to Lao-Tzu, and all practitioners of Taoism.
The Way is not the only way, but it is the way of the Sage.
So the Sage teaches that the Way brings contentment.
[There is no crime greater than being desirable;
There is no disaster greater than not being content;
There is no misfortune more painful than being covetous:
Hence in knowing the sufficiency of being content, one will constantly have sufficient.]
Contentment follows from having no desire.
One who practices the Way will be subordinate to all men, but will not know humiliation.
Hence in [knowing contentment
You will suffer no humiliation]
The true disciple of the Way will know no anxiety, because the wisdom of the Way means accepting the world.
The Disciple listened to the words of the Sage, with rapt concentration. She wanted to learn from the Sage and live by the Way. She yearned for the contentment that would come from the Way. The Sage counselled the Disciple that if she meditated on the Way, she would find her own path to the practice of the Way.
The Disciple did as the Sage bid her. She sat motionless and let all feeling drift away from her body. She allowed herself to relax and to forget. She concentrated on all the worries and ills of her life, and as she visualised them in her mind, she relaxed and felt them melt away.
The Disciple practised daily. Every day, she found that her meditation became more natural. Gradually it became a part of her life, until eventually she found that her worries dissolved even when she wasn’t meditating. Practising the Way slowly bought her the contentment that she sought. And therefore the Way must be true. The Disciple’s belief in the Way was complete, even though she didn’t know what the Way was.
The Way causes the outward suppression of negative emotional states. In the world of the Disciple, no practitioner of the Way displays any negative emotional states, and therefore there is no evidence of any lack of contentment in a practitioner. The Way promises contentment, but also causes its practitioners to suppress all physical manifestation of negative emotional states; so the Way manufactures the evidence of its own truth, and is irrefutable to its believers.
This Scenario is a combination of Scenario A and Scenario B reconfigured as a belief system. Scenario A shows that if someone lives in a world where other people suppress the behaviour of an emotional state, it makes that individual unable to correctly identify that emotion in themself. Scenario B shows that when someone suppresses such behaviour in themself, they are unable to know that they experience that emotion, despite the fact that they may recognise it in other people. As with The Generic C/D ideology, an ideology is collective, so the distinction between the first person and the second/third person disappears. People believe that the Way releases them from all negative emotional states, but together they gradually begin to habitually suppress all the behavioural manifestations of such emotions, so they manufacture the evidence that their belief is true. The parts of this Scenario that are enclosed in square brackets are direct quotes from the Tao Te Ching.159 I interpret the Tao Te Ching as an A/B belief system in that it promises the avoidance of negative emotional states to its believers. However, it is not (we hope) a generic A/B belief system.
THE CAUSE AND CONTENT OF BELIEF
Let us consider the lifecycle of a belief.
Originally, someone comes up with an idea that they argue enhances human wellbeing. In the Generic Ideologies, I called this person “the Sage” but history provides plenty of real examples. In Part I, we encountered Confucius and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to name but two. Shortly, we will look at Karl Marx, Chairman Mao and Adam Smith. Initially, people believe these theories because they rectify whatever chaos immediately preceded them. Generally, new ideologies promote freedom from whatever was the scourge of humanity beforehand. If you had just survived a famine, you would believe a theory that abolished famines irrespective of what its other consequences might be. This is convenient because it makes the essential step of defining human wellbeing something that is easy to overlook. So a theory is adopted, and the squeaky wheels of political power put it into practice. Immediately, it becomes clear that this is tricky. Problems arise that the Sage didn’t visualise and these problems are solved with political fudge and sticking tape.
Soon, people stop reading the great works of the Sage. This occurs because the political fudge and sticking tape quite quickly makes them obsolete. When we return to read these works, we find they are surprisingly difficult to read anyway. Adam Smith is mindnumbingly dull, and reading Marx is like having lead weights attached to your eyelids. Mao, by contrast, is hysterically funny, but only because he is so incomprehensible. I rather fancy calling myself a “Splitist Anti-Rightist Reactionary Capitalist Roader”, just because it would look so good on the tee shirt. Maoist slogans all used simplistic principals which sound like the “Four No’s” or the “Three Yes’s” and it was all tickety-boo, because nobody dared to ask how they were actually supposed to put this into practice.
When people stop reading the words of the particular Sage of their belief, the process of belief drift begins. People still think they believe the belief, but it starts to change, and gradually the process of believing takes over from the purpose of believing. The purpose of the belief was to enhance human wellbeing, but the process morphs into the behavioural enactment of that wellbeing. People want to believe, even though they are gradually forgetting what they are supposed to believe. They believe that the belief causes human wellbeing; so, to prove that they are loyal to the belief, they start to enact that wellbeing and slowly this becomes habitual. Without realising it, the believers manufacture the evidence that their belief truly does promote human wellbeing, even though they forget what the belief actually is.
Taking this process to its logical conclusion, we can completely separate the cause of a belief from its content; and once the cause of the belief has been independently established as a behavioural and perceptive feedback loop, we can replace its content with any tooth fairy nonsense that happens to be close at hand. This is the very simple reason why belief drift is inevitable, and humans can believe anything.
Let us compare North Korean Communism with American Republicanism [which I can do without blinking]. We find that these two belief systems have something surprising in common: they both would be unrecognisable to their spiritual founders. With both belief systems, the process of the belief has replaced the purpose of the belief. Were Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin alive today, they simply wouldn’t recognise North Korean Communism, despite the fact that most North Koreans (and everybody else) think that they are Marxist–Leninists. North Korean Communism is a sort of personality cult where nobody can gain access to the “Dear Leader” (or is it “Great Successor” these days?) unless they enact a perpetual fake ecstasy. Along these lines, I will shortly demonstrate that a tyrant’s belief of faithfully serving their people can be a sincere belief.
Similarly, Adam Smith wouldn’t recognise American Republicanism, despite the fact that he practically invented free-market capitalism and members of the Republican Party think they are free-market capitalists. What makes Republicanism madder than a python on a bicycle is that the revulsion that Republicans feel towards “Socialism” has become a behavioural reflex. They all try to outdo each other’s revulsion to prove their ideological commitment. Over time, they have learned to enact this reflex automatically, so they don’t have to ask themselves what the word means anymore. Now they are unable to say what is wrong with it without resorting to a slogan that could have been invented by Chairman Mao. Gradually as the process of their belief takes over from its purpose, a surprising inversion occurs. Whereas European Socialism was all about benefiting the poor, Republicanism has turned into Socialism to benefit the rich. Few seem to have noticed this but it really isn’t so surprising since many of them drive Cadillacs to a place of worship that preaches humility. The result is the growing tendency in America where poor people vote for the party of the wealthy and wealthy people vote for the party of the poor; and the risk is that when nobody votes for their own self-interest, that democracy becomes self-destructive to the people it represents.
Let us return to serious politics! What is the greatest belief drift in history? To find this, you need to consider that we can not only separate the cause of a belief from its content, but also the origin of a belief can be something that is completely different from what we think it is. To demonstrate this, we need to plunge into history.