And they really did believe, they believed it more fervently than they believe in money, with more certainty than their certainty that the skeptics are right and the scientists are wrong about global warming, with even more certainty than their certainty in the indisputable fact that God created and the animals and winged things that live in the sky and the fishes that swimmeth in the sea and they all got on a big boat (except for the fishes that swimmeth of course) when God made it rain a lot causing a huge flood and He promised that He'd never mess around with people's weather again, not like that anyway, Honest.
They had to believe or else how could they convince their funders to back them? How could they convince their supporters to work for them or their base to come out and vote for them?
I once had a job doing telesales, trying to sell advertizing space in a catalogue being sent to China. The group of us starting on the same day had a training session where we were told how great this catalogue was, how it was sent around to the top 10,000 business people in China, how any western company that was serious about breaking into the Chinese market had to be in this catalogue, with the had very much in bold (I'd put it in a doublebold tag if that were valid HTML). Then we were each given a book of leads and told to get on the phones. By the end of the first week none of us newbies had made any sales, and since it was a commission only job that meant none of us had earned any money, though there were other people in the company who were selling and some were making very good money.
Friday evening in the pub with the other newbies I asked what they thought of the product we were selling. It was really just a glossy catalogue full of adverts, and it wasn't very big, only A5 size. Would these top 10,000 Chinese business people really sit down and read a load of adverts? The catalogue had no actual content, no articles, no horoscopes even, just ads. Someone said yes, of course they would. They wanted to do business with the west, so if a western company was serious about doing business with China they had to be in this catalogue (with that being a doublebold had there, just like the one in the training session).
I realized then that if I was going to make any sales I'd have to convince myself of the truth of that spiel, and I'd have to believe it with more certainty than I believe in something that I'm very certain about. Whether it was actually true or not was irrelevant, the only truth that mattered was that I had bills to pay and I needed to get some money out of this job. If I were to stand any chance of convincing the person on the other end of the phone to part with their money I had to believe in what I was selling.
I really was pretty broke and there was a chance here to earn a lot of money in quite a short space of time, so I wouldn't have to stick at this job indefinitely, I could quit after a few months and live off my earnings for a while, travel a bit maybe, but to get to wherever it was I decided to go I was going to have to lie to myself. That weekend that's what I tried to do.
Until my mind started to drift and I thought about how it could be advantageous in so many circumstances to be able to convince yourself of something you didn't really believe, though if you were able to do that successfully could you then really say it wasn't something you didn't really believe? Really. Surely it would become something that you did believe. And if you did it well, it would become something that you had always believed.
To win the nomination Romney had to shift his positions to appeal to the Republican base then, once he was their nominee, he had to shift again. That's where the Romnesia came in. It became an essential tactic.
Republicans should target the stoned neo-hippy vote. I don't want to give Republicans any assistance here, that kind of thing probably wouldn't go down well on this site, and if I thought there were any influential Republicans who might read my words and heed my excellent advice then perhaps I wouldn't offer it, though seeing them all crying the other night I can't help but feel some sympathy.
Having a stoned conversation with one of my neo-hippy friends she was saying the important thing about what you believe is not whether it's true or false so much as whether it makes you more powerful. Which is the basis of much of the self-help industry, all that "believe in yourself even though you know you're crap" kind of stuff.
I had a friend who a few years ago, during one of the world cup years, was convinced that England were going to win. (He's English.) I and many others told him that of course there was a chance that England might win, that was a pretty remote possibility. And then, when England didn't win, when he came out of hiding a few months later he said it was down to the fact that we, the English, hadn't believed in ourselves enough. If only we'd had a bit of faith, that could have brought us victory. As George Michael sings, you've got to have faith. (He actually sings
Cuz I gotta have faith
Mmm I gotta have faith
Because I got to have faith-a-faith-a-faith
I gotta have faith-a-faith-a-faith
and the song has absolutely nothing to do with football, but never mind.)
Being able to author your own beliefs is a talent that some of us have and some of us lack. For some, the truth is sacred. For others, the self is sacred. The individual. Me. I value my individual freedom above all else, and the freedom I value most of all is my freedom to believe what I choose to believe, unconstrained by the constraints of reality.
Perhaps some of them would deny that they hold themselves to be sacred. Some would say that it's America they hold sacred. They're the ones who truly love America; the fact that the America they love is an America that no longer exists, is a mythologized America that never really existed, that doesn't matter. You're straying into the territory of the reality-based community there, and they are lovers of reality which means they can't be true lovers of America. You can't have two lovers. Ask Newt Gingrich.
As a proud non-American I've never understood the idea of loving America. Loving a nation. It makes about as much sense to me as David Bowie's Loving the alien. In fact, Bowie makes far more sense to me.
Watching them come and go
The Templars and the Saracens
They're travelling the holy land
Opening telegrams
Who can deny that?
But if you pray
all your sins are hooked upon the sky
Pray and the heathen lie will disappear
Prayers they hide
the saddest view
(Believing the strangest things,
loving the alien)
Perhaps that has a special resonance with me because Mrs Otip believes herself to be an alien. She thinks I'm in denial when I pretend that I don't love her. She can feel it in her ample gut (though she's lost a lot of weight recently, it has to be said - going to the gym almost every day so she is).
She's right of course. I am in denial and she has a lovely gut.