Anyone remember the Clinton Chronicles? It started as laughable wingnut side-show that grew to right wing mythic proportion in which Bill Clinton, the President who couldn't keep a goddamn blow job under wraps, was the head of a vast band of secret powerful, murdering drug smuggling thugs intent on overthrowing the United States and putting us under some kind of vague BCCI/UN Charter Government. Ever wonder how people could buy that crazy shit? Well, funny you should ask. I'm not a neurophysiologist, and I'm gonna murder a lot of this. But hopefully, enough of it will make sense that it will get some people thinking. And thinking is one way out of silly beliefs.
Let's say you're a hominid, circa 200,000 BC. The earth has been populated for a long time by some pretty smart animals. Wolves and pigs are clever, one could even say that dolphins and chimps are intelligent. But you, in all your new, anatomically modern human glory can run intellectual rings around them. You are a hyperintelligent bubble-headed, mutant sci-fi freak of nature. Chimps have the brain of an ape; you have the brain of Mozart.
Your brain is big, but it's not a truth detector, it's a fitness engine. It's huge because, for a time, it increased the evolutionary fitness of your direct ancestors to have big brains. Arguably right up until about the summer of ‘45.
You use this big ass brain to plan, to hunt, to remember hundreds of things. Like what part of the plant is edible and which is poisonous, the trail that leads to the savana or the creek, the face of a relative, friend, lover, or a rival. Very important stuff that last part, because you live in clans, organized and sometimes violent gangs. You might be a flint knapping Stone Age nomad, but when it comes to social relationships, Machiavelli is written from your cerebral cortex right down to your genes.
Your supercharged brain also comes handily softwired with some pretty cool accessories unique in all the world: fire is delightful and mesmerizing, unlike most animals who run like hell away from it, you want to feed it and play with it and burn down the forest starting at age two. And, exposed to a tool making tradition and a language from infancy, you'll pick them both up without much conscious effort at all.
Long ago your smaller brained ancestors got smart enough that sooner or later, it dawned on them that one day, they're gonna die. How does a big brain deal with awful thoughts like that? Remember, your big brain is a fitness engine. If it enhances your evolutionary fitness to be deceived or distracted, your brain will lie it's ass off to you. It doesn't have to make sense or have motives, or be perfect; it only has to work better than its immediate rivals. If the only big brains around are prone to migraine headaches, delusions, and schizophrenia, then guess what? Some people will suffer those maladies to an excruciating degree.
So it's not too surprising that evolution might take a brain that's awful plastic and select for brains that tell their owners useful lies. If those self deceptions or distractions improve fitness, they're amplified over time. A feedback process sets up and it can lead to some strange places; bowery birds that make weird nested displays; massive horns on herbivores: grotesquely huge brains in hominids.
One way your brain might distract you from terrible realities is to enhance a previously existing bargaining subroutine that allows an expanded sensation of free will and consciousness. So you can 'choose,' freely of course, not to think about your inevitable death and to think about something else instead, like say, writing a diary on Daily Kos. That’s not to say that’s the only reason or even a big reason we evolved consciousness.
The origin of sentience is hotly debated topic still in it's scientific infancy. For example we tend to think that consciousness and intelligence walk hand in hand, but there's plenty of organisms that solve very complex problems with much smaller brains than ours. It’s intriguing to imagine what might evolution come up with if allowed to proceed for another billion years on problem solvers that are not sentient. We have no idea. But odds are consciouness does not have a grand reason for being beyond improving the fitness of our recent direct ancestors.
We also tend to think that the consciousness is us, or most of us. We like it so much we resist the idea that it is by definition just the part of the brain that's self aware, and it might not be as big a part of the brain as we like to think. Worse, that part may not be in control like it tries to convince us it is, the mighty I behind the eyes. More likely, it's slaved to the subconscious and unconscious parts all the way down to the brain stem rather than the other way around. There are cases where people are utterly convinced they are dead, they will beg you to bury them before their flesh starts rotting off their corpse. There are cases where people are utterly convinced their relatives are imposters, demons or aliens or podpeople -- they come up with fanciful explanations fed by cultural archetypes.
These people have brains that are lying to them so convincingly at some deep level that it's pointless to reason with them. You might as well try and reason an epileptic out of having seizures. And what's startling to consider, and the lesson for us all, is they don't use their conscious to reason their way out of their delusions, quite the opposite, they use their conscious to support them. It's a perfect conspiracy. So perfect those suffering from it aren't even aware of it, can't be aware of it, and will deny it vigorously if confronted with it.
Brains lie naturally too. Our big mutant brains are about the best goddamn liars known in the animal kingdom.
Some of those self deceptions, like religion in general, carry little or no political risk to either major party in modern day America and thus by extension to political sites like Daily Kos. Others, like the Clinton Chronicles are extremely useful -- for the opposing party to lampoon their rivals as demented or stupid. Is there anyone here who hasn't witnessed this phenomenon among wingnuts from time to time?
The reason wingnuts might be deluded -- or pretend they are -- is in part because, among their increasingly insular society, their brains have been conditioned to believe it improves their evolutionary fitness to be deceived. It’s damn near pathological in some cases. The fringe isn’t just deluded, they compete among one another for very real social rewards to proudly display who is the most genuinely and completely deluded. No matter how ridiculous the self deception or self distraction, the believers’ rational ego might not filter it out. In fact, based on past experience, it might actively work against them and construct all kinds of flimsy intellectual escape hatches for the belief to survive regardless of the evidence or lack thereof. And before we get all high and mighty, don’t think for a second that progressives are immune to this. We have the brain of Mozart, we also have the brain of Sarah Palin.
The good news is most people on the left or the right do not suffer from some rare syndrome or self reinforcing social delusions so powerful they can't reason their way out of them, eventually. But we all have our peculiar beliefs, and some of us are driven to hold onto them tightly. Challenge them, threaten them with analysis, and they can become downright resentful, even angry, and often they won’t even be able to explain why they get angry.
With practice and the support of a consensus, what we loosely call in the blogosphere the reality based community, you can usually beat this down. Just like we don't rape when were horny or grab someone's food when we're hungry, we can control irrational or unsubstantiated beliefs. And if you can't, well, if I were really conspiracy prone, I might speculate that's evidence for your brain conspiring against you.