Common phrases like "seduced by evil" or "corrupted by power" often call to mind an acquiescence to external pressure or, in a less generous sense, the slow revelation of inherent moral weaknesses by flawed characters. But the reality of moral corruption has nothing to do with such script-friendly personal dramatics: The story of how otherwise decent, thoughtful human beings become fervid advocates of unhinged claims and ideas that couldn't survive a moment's scrutiny by their own intellect has almost nothing to do with who they are as people, and even less to do with what they believe their values to be. In fact, there aren't many things as impersonal as the genesis of sincere falsehoods: Behind it is the banal concept called Marginal profit.
I. Evolutionary Background
When I say "profit," I do not mean that anyone expects to make money: The vast majority of people involved in every madness in human history, big or small, frivolous or destructive, never got or expected to get a single dime from their behavior. While it is true there are sociopaths who cultivate lies like farmers grow crops, this is (all things considered) a very small and surprisingly irrelevant group of people: More often than not they are trivial failures who never come to the attention of history, and those miniscule few who do become prominent only do so through highly unusual, self-selecting conditions.
Rather, the profit I refer to is that at the most basic level of human behavior - energy invested against energy returned. A profit may take the form of pleasure, excitement, curiosity, satisfaction, or even fear: The key is that the response adds energy to the thoughts that generated them, not necessarily that it is positive or helpful. Thus we see how falsehoods, just like biological organisms, may be naturally-selected - i.e., ideas that create an energetic response may, in context, be self-sustaining regardless of objective value. This is the concept, now regularly cited and abused in internet discussions, of the meme: An idea perpetuated according to its own arbitrary internal characteristics rather than any value it carries as information.
A conscious mind is a distorted model of the world extrapolated from very limited environmental stimuli, and most of what goes on it is a consequence of the environment rather than a direct representation - the actual framework of reality as we perceive it is pretty well established by the time we are teenagers. What remains beyond that becomes devoted to competitive drives - to social ascendance within a hierarchy, and this is where things get sticky. There is nothing ambiguous about food, shelter, or evasion of predators - you either have food or you don't; you're either protected from the elements or you're not; and you're either alive or digesting in something else's stomach. Instrumental intelligence is therefore rigorously discrete - when true/false is equivalent to live/die, there is not much room for interpretation.
The complexities begin to pile up when the model is no longer concerned with immediate survival, but with degrees of success: Suddenly "being wrong" is not an oxymoron - wrongness is not synonymous with extinction, and therefore does not represent its own negation. False ideas about where to find food deprive themselves of the energy needed to continue, but false ideas about how best to distribute food - naturally, to the benefit of the mind thinking them - take much longer to feedback, often beyond the lifetime of the individual who profits. And false ideas about things that have zero apparent relevance to survival - regardless of how relevant they become over time - can easily survive long enough to perpetuate themselves before their consequences are felt. But again, I digress into the common meaning of "profit." There is a more basic calculus involved than material acquisition.
II. Self-Reference Goeth Before The Fall
As for me, all I know that is I know nothing.
--Socrates
The greatest thinkers and scientists of any age tend to be renowned for their cultivated naivete - particularly, the pursuit of what they know to be an un-perfectable model based on dynamic information and contingent assumptions. They do not say, "This is how it is" - they say "This is what I see," reasoning inductively from continuous change, and understanding that whatever they produce is conditional. Like children, their eyes remain continuously open to the outside world - they do not take a mere glimpse and then turn away from it to extrapolate "perfect" ideas from limited information.
But this is what human beings generally do, because it's a lot easier (i.e., uses much less energy) and works pretty well under most circumstances: We have our period of openness and curiosity as children, then as we grow into adulthood our awareness becomes more intermittent - we come to rely on deduction from already-formed assumptions to determine what is true or false about "non-essentials" rather than just opening our eyes and looking.
Imagine you are walking down a street looking for a particular restaurant, and happen to walk right in front of it. The sign is well-lit, prominently displayed, and everyone you ask says it's right there, but the map you carefully constructed before embarking on your search says it's two blocks over. You like your map: It's bright, colorful, well-diagrammed - a real testament to your competence as an artist, cartographer, and person-of-the-world. What to do?
Well, if people behaved in this metaphor as they do with respect to political opinions, they would ignore the sign and everyone who gave them directions that conflicted with their map - they would walk right past the restaurant they're looking for and find another one whose location their maps correctly identified, because not getting what they claim to want would cause them less grief than interrupting the order and completeness of the model they've formed of the world. Their map is reality, and the outside world is chaotic, frightening, and dangerously lacking in both aesthetic perfection and ego-satisfaction. They would have to mark up their beautiful map with scribbled edits to keep it current with the new information.
Now, the tragic irony here is that staying aware is not painful or draining - quite the opposite. There is a reason that scientists and other thinkers who change the world have a reputation for living to ripe old ages, and it isn't for being care-free people or hypochondriacs who preserve themselves like museum pieces - it's because they tend to be humble observers who connect themselves with their environment, and it enlivens them to perceive. The fact is, it enlivens everyone to perceive, but it takes practice and attention - so people who are distracted, exhausted, or who have simply gone too long without being surprised have to make some level of effort to reengage their minds. And that is often a tall order.
Some people don't know their minds had ever shut down in the first place, and think that repeating the same dead-end logic loops based on premises that no longer apply (if they ever did in the first place) is perception. If you provide them with information that is fundamentally incompatible with their assumptions, more often than not the information will simply be ignored - it will "go in one ear and out the other," like the vast majority of things human beings experience, because according to their internal model it's just irrelevant noise they're hearing. It doesn't fit, and it would cost more energy to wake up than to just let the information bounce off the walls of their mind like the proverbial square peg trying to get into a round hole.
But suppose the information cannot be ignored - suppose it hounds them relentlessly, beating against the walls of their happy labyrinth demanding to be acknowledged. Maybe they pick up on that energy and achieve a perception, turning their assumptions momentarily fluid again without the agony they had assumed would attend it. Maybe reality is just obtrusive enough to bend the walls of their opinions into a shape that can accommodate the change in circumstances. But every once in a while, with some people, they interpret the insistence of reality as an attack and its sources as enemies determined to destroy everything they stand for.
When the "besiegers" talk about the world outside the discredited model, the defenders simply do not know what the hell is being talked about. It's gibberish to them - like if you tried to describe the emergent properties of the third dimension to people who live on a 2D plane. They would think you are a liar, or an obscurantist snob insulting their intelligence by daring to suggest that they are failing to take something crucial into consideration.
This metaphor describes the precondition to the birth of a lie - falling into a headspace where the definition of truth is that something conforms to your own deductions based on limited information. Intelligence under this condition becomes mono-directional - you think and analyze, but there are ideas of your own creation that you cease to recognize as your own creation: They are no longer subjected to scrutiny, and anything which appears to violate them is either automatically discarded or deemed Enemy Action. Reality, in other words, becomes self-referential: That which conforms to the state of your mind is True, and that which would command a change on your part is False.
III. Historical examples
Religions, bigotries, conspiracy theories, and political ideologies are basically all consequences of this phenomenon. A religion may begin with a hallucination, a psychotic episode, a drug-induced experience, a philosophical rumination, or an abstract spiritual feeling on the part of an individual, but what perpetuates it is the next generation - the people raised not to examine certain beliefs, until they cease to even be aware of them as beliefs rather than immutable facts. Centuries of so-called "scholars" dedicated their lives to deducing preposterous theological minutiae of zero truth value (the proverbial "angels dancing on the head of a pin") because they built one unquestioned belief on top of another, one supposition on top of another, until such ridiculous matters were all that remained for a mind to examine.
A similar, albeit shorter-lived process begat racial theories in 19th century Europe, culminating in the Holocaust - a psychotic reaction many of its perpetrators sincerely believed to be not only justified, but a kind of "emergency response" to an "imminent threat to civilization." European anti-Semitism and violence against Jews was nothing new, but it was the first time an entire nation-state had its economic resources mobilized around the singular purpose of exterminating a race of people - which some comments by top Nazi leaders indicate they viewed as their most urgent priority, ahead even of winning the war.
These leaders believed, not as an abstraction, but as a manifest fact, that doctors, lawyers, factory workers, waitresses - basically random people who were mostly indistinguishable from ethnic Germans, Poles, Dutch, etc. but for religious traditions - constituted a massive conspiracy to corrupt, destroy, and rule over all the other peoples of the world. They believed Germany had lost WW1 because of this conspiracy, that it was the driving force behind Bolshevism, and that this tiny minority was both (a)inferior in every way, and yet (b)so powerful and insidious that it had to be totally extirpated from the Earth to avoid destroying civilization.
People with high-IQs, elite university educations, and deep knowledge of history, science, literature, and art believed this and vociferously promoted it. Why? There has been more thought put into examining this question than I'd ever care to become conversant in, but you will perhaps be slightly offended if I answer the question by saying "One thing followed another." Because that's basically how Big Lies, and really any lies, get started and are perpetuated: It begins with one thought. This thought might be nothing special, and contain not the slightest shadow of the monstrousness it will unleash, but the person thinking it fails to subject it to scrutiny. He just lets it sit there, accreting corollary deductions over time, distorting his thinking and cavalierly transmitting itself to others through his attitudes and unconscious dispositions.
Eventually this person reaches a decision point - he can either finally subject it to scrutiny, which might take a little effort, or he can just assume it's true and deduce another thought from it. There is nothing menacing in the original thought, it's probably totally casual, so why expend the energy being cerebral on such a trivial matter? The marginal profit picture is clear: It's much easier and more satisfying to just build another supposition on top of the original than to examine it and face the embarrassment of admitting to yourself that you entertained a stupid thought. Why reflect so seriously when there is no immediate price to building a house of cards out of dubious opinions?
But see, the process never ends until someone ends it. One supposition builds on top of another; one unexamined assumption accretes like a barnacle beside another - eventually what is built is a formidable battlement of beliefs: One with so much energy, thought, tradition, and culture invested in it that even direct contact with empirical reality cannot penetrate it. It would cost too much individual cognitive dissonance, social resentment, and disunion in the community to even acknowledge its questionability, let alone take one look at it and burst into bellows of contemptuous laughter. Thinking in any direction that would undermine it is discouraged, so even more energy goes into strengthening it.
Pretty soon, just as the greatest minds of the Medieval World whiled away their days debating the excretory functions of invisible beings, so German intellectuals ended up debating the proper response to the worldwide conspiracy of seamstresses, file clerks, and shoe makers who were apparently spending their leisure time plotting the downfall of mankind. Even many of those who defied Hitler and resisted the Holocaust - e.g., Claus von Stauffenberg, portrayed (very bizarrely) by Tom Cruise in the film Valkyrie - were unabashedly anti-Semitic long before the Nazis came to power, and simply found Hitler's policies to be an "overreaction" to what they considered legitimate grievances against Jews. Some advocated forced sterilization, and jumped ship only when they heard about einsatzgruppen machine-gunning children in the streets. There was minimal recognition that what they held true was complete, utter nonsense.
And why? Because they judged truth against what they already held to be true rather than...simply...opening...their...eyes. It's not difficult: It really isn't. There is no real profit in holding fast to an idea if it fails to reflect reality, no matter how much time you've wasted entertaining it. But if a thought currently entertained leads to conclusions that are pleasing, or at least easier to understand than a complex reality, then there is greater Marginal Profit in proceeding with it than letting it die a natural death in the light of continuously-updated information. Eventually one reaches a point where defending a belief only accepted in the first place because it seemed so inconsequential becomes an all-consuming crusade.
IV. Current relevance
Religion, bigotry, and destructive political ideologies are just the most extreme examples of the phenomenon, illustrating the birth of lies and the evolution of liars. Far from being comic book villains or theatrically flawed characters, we find that in most cases people are simply responding to the natural calculus of marginal profit when they ignore reality and accept, build on, and promulgate lies. Human beings cannot be attentive to everything at all times, so disinformation, myth, prejudice, and just plain stupidity creep into the cracks when we're not looking. And because of that, lies never disappear - not ever.
Every Big Lie ever told hangs around humanity like a fart that will not dissipate. Plenty of Muslims and Christians, just to use two examples, believe lies told in the Dark Ages, simply because those ideas have successfully perpetuated themselves through the social processes described above, regardless of what reason, science, or objective history tells them. It isn't that fundamentalists are inherently dumb or insane, it's just that their definition of truth is that which conforms to what they already believe.
Now, talking about the lazy-minded derivation of Nazism and religious fundamentalism on a liberal blog is probably the most pointless type of preaching to the choir imaginable - I would do as well just listing times tables, because nothing I have said is remotely controversial or challenging. Those among us lost in their own internal labyrinths would agree with me just as readily as people who are awake and thinking, because the people I've talked about are all dead, and were all enemies of progressive ideals.
But what of the rumor-mill "progressive" blogs that specialize in circular-sourced articles, and have turned into little more than cannibal pornography for self-hating Democrats? What of the increasingly vitriolic, lizard-brained postings that cite their own author's previous work as evidence of its claims, and whose "trail of evidence" ultimately leads back to some trivial speculation or off-hand comment with no trace of empirical basis? What of this guy:
[Barack Obama is] an ideologue who agrees with Alan Simpson. Basically a Republican asshole. No more a child of Satan than any other Republican. (7+ / 1-)
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by expatjourno on Fri Dec 17, 2010 at 03:35:43 PM PST
This comment was posted on Daily Kos on December 17th, so perhaps someone can remind me how many days that was before the "Republican asshole" integrated the military for gays. It was a comment from an alternate universe, where someone else named Barack Obama is President rather than the one who actually is - a universe where this commenter's disappointments and resentments have fed on themselves and created their own pocket cosmos impervious to what is actually going on around them. And this person is not alone (from the same diary):
[Barack Obama is] doing it because he's a Reagan Republican. That's the bottom line.(5+ / 0-)
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by porchdog1961 on Fri Dec 17, 2010 at 03:45:10 PM PST
Being called a "Reagan Republican" or even a "Republican asshole" is hardly the worst slur being lobbed at President Obama by some "progressives" in an increasingly insular, self-referential blogosphere that comes to resemble right-wing commentary the more divorced it becomes from empirical fact. And as in most cases, it's the simply result of people who think their own opinions are a legitimate basis for deducing facts - who believe that building an ideational structure consisting entirely of their own emotions and unexamined reactions constitutes thinking.
Generally speaking, the outcome is benign and leads to a few silly opinions - e.g., angel visitations, alien abductions, Big Foot, etc. - but sometimes it gets extended to the point where you have people broadcasting from a separate universe where Up is Down, Black is White, Slavery is Freedom, and Barack Obama is a Republican betrayer of all that is holy. And from what I've seen, these people behave true to form even when the President has achieved an unqualified success (e.g., the DADT victory), either completely ignoring it or firing off some offensively condescending, painfully grudging "attaboy" before changing the subject to the next excuse for slandering him.
And other than the grade-level of the vocabulary, I don't see much of a psychological difference in the approach to reality between these people and the President's Republican opponents: In fact, they seem to take quite a bit of pride in the resemblance, and apparently believe that being equally impervious to reality will make them equally effective at advancing their agenda. Unfortunately, it won't - the Republican agenda is the product of quite-rational power politics by an economic elite, and the teabagger clowns whom many a left-wing blogger now emulate were simply a staged circus to deceive people.
In the case of delusional, slanderous blog posts about the President by self-described "progressives," the only people deceived by them are the ones writing them: They drive nothing to the left but their own assumptions - nobody else is listening. But that fact hardly matters to minds so far-gone: If they drive their own assumptions to the left, and the President invariably fails to follow, then they just become that much angrier, that much more vitriolic, and find it that much easier to believe whatever conspiracy theory or unsubstantiated rumor they next hear about him. It's a self-sustaining system.
So when I say these purveyors of rumor and falsehood are liars, I mean they are Big Liars - I mean they believe their own lies, and have built them up into a giant termite hill of bigoted bullshit from the humblest grains of mischaracterization into full-blown madness. I don't believe they're racist, for the most part, but it doesn't matter because their thinking is parallel to that of racist bigots. By one path or another, they have arrived at virtually identical conclusions and attitudes toward this President, and protect those beliefs from challenge through an identically paranoid ideological siege mentality.
They have invested a lot of energy in demonizing this President, and they will not let it go no matter what happens: Every liberal achievement of this President, they will claim to have forced it out of him, but will accept zero responsibility for failures or disappointments. Failure they will attribute to him alone, and will take (in fact, have been taking for quite some time) enormous pleasure in formulating unhinged theories about his character and motives to explain them. Well, I have never tolerated that kind of bullshit from anyone, and I'm not about to start now simply because a house-of-cards built on hate and mendacity gains a measure of community inertia. My message to them is simple: 2 + 2 = 4. You can't rumor, slander, or conspiracy-theory your way around that.