beliefs are safety-seeking

Think of a time someone presented you with evidence that one your beliefs was incorrect, or at least sloppy. Did you change your mind? If not outwardly, to your conversation partner, at least in your heart?

It’s a trick question. You can only recall the times for which the answer is yes. In the other cases, the internal conflict between beliefs and observation probably didn’t rise fully to consciousness.

Most of us learn young not to challenge others’ beliefs directly, because there’s no profit in it.

But why isn’t there?

The easiest explanation, useful only for explaining the behavior of people we don’t know well, is that those people (over there) don’t respond to reason. They have an immunity. That’s why they don’t see what we see.

This explanation has issues. First, wherever we are is someone’s over there, and yet we self-report loyalty to reason. Second, intra-species differences in reasoning capacity and form are not that big when we think macro. Any time we get into a vehicle, or deposit money in a bank, or play poker, we are betting on other humans to reason the way we do. We bet our lives and life savings on this daily.

A true immunity to reason would look less like someone holding a different political view, and more like someone trying to lay an egg in a laundry basket and refusing to speak human language.

Instead of explaining away the beliefs of others, a truly valuable model of belief would be one that helps us identify, and understand, our own.

We’ll start with the hardware.

brains: not truth-seeking devices

Being wrong can be dangerous, but except in extreme cases like believing air will meet your nutrition and caloric needs, it’s not the most urgent of dangers. I.e. not what killed your not-ancestors before they (didn’t) reproduce. Consider more pressing threats:

• A group of humans deciding to harm you
• The group of humans you reside in, in which you enjoy safety in numbers from other groups that might decide to harm you, casting you out

In societies that use money, loners can buy remote cabins and write novels. This is anomalous. In the long view of human history, loners die super fast.

It’s not good to be a loner, and even if your late-stage spreadsheet brain has calculated that your expenses are covered, your ape brain will still be like hey what the hell we need to fix this asap. Including by means unavailable to questioning by spreadsheet brain. Yes, I’m talking about the spooky place, the unconscious.

For a neutral example, let’s think of fashion. Have you ever disliked a kind of clothing because it stirs fear? Seems strange to say it that way maybe, but if you were a high school student and wore a top hat to school, would your friends not take issue? If you insisted on becoming the top-hat guy, would you manage to keep your friends until the end of the year? Somehow ape brain knows of this risk, and so when you look at the top hat on the store rack you’re like “that’s not my style” but really you’re fucking terrified you might like top hats and that this might cost you the safety of group membership.

As of writing this (2021) it’s “in” for manly men in America like Terry Crews to watch romantic dramas and cry and share their vulnerability. But think of 2004. It was controversial for men to wear pink! Now they wear it all the time and it means nothing. Did some large proportion of men in America suddenly realize pink suits their aesthetic, or was the desire to feel things while watching movies always there, denied entry at the gates of consciousness by ape brain, who was at the time not convinced of the safety of nominally feminine inclinations?

And this is just small groups.

big groups: altogether nastier than small ones

Imagine it’s a super long time ago, before pencils or pens, and you and your friends and family are chilling in this tranquil glade with a surfeit of fruit and nuts and other goodies. There’s about Dunbar’s number of you.

Now imagine that nearby, there’s a group of five thousand and they want your glade.

The fact is you’re borked. They’re taking the glade. Groups that can enlarge beyond the constraints of interpersonal relationships wield incredible power.

But if the group is larger than interpersonal relationships can manage, how could you cooperate with people in the group you don’t know? Normally, someone you just met would be unpredictable. You couldn’t know whether they’d harm you, or whether they’d execute shared work competently and in good faith.

To solve this problem, we homo sapiens have ideology.

To see how ideology enables cooperation, consider a modern one: the belief that The United States of America exists.

The United States, like most nation states, created itself by saying it was a real thing and then warring against and genociding all the skeptics. Once only believers were left standing, it was a genuine country. On the homeland, we renew the country’s existence by instilling the belief that it’s real in young children, and abroad, we drop bombs so that no one forgets.

Maybe it sounds trite to say this, because we’re so steeped in this ideology I’m basically gesturing madly at the air, but lots of would-be countries don’t succeed at this. Every failed revolution is an instance where someone said “this is a country” and other people (with tanks) were like “no, it’s not.”

Acts such as paying taxes, abiding laws, and risking your life in war, which you otherwise would never ever do, are enabled by a huge, strong, multigenerational foundation of ideology.

Now let’s inspect a smaller, more vulnerable ideology: that of the cult.

There's a truism in startup world: When things start going very badly for a company, the strongest people generally leave first. They have the highest standards for their own opportunities and the most confidence that they can thrive in a new environment. - Andrew Yang, War on Normal People

Every growth-focused startup is a cult. They all share one ideology: the equity, one day, will be worth a lot of money. Founders and low-level employees are usually true believers. But investors and highly skilled, highly mobile employees tend to hold their faith a distance, where they can reevaluate it as needed. Why?

Startups, because they pay less in cash than companies with mature income, need people to believe in the ideology. Otherwise, recruiting and retaining staff would be impossible. Otherwise, people would resent their compensation, slack, and doom everyone’s future equity values.

When a doomsday comes for the company, those with other options will call their friends for referrals. Those without, who if they lost faith would be facing another long stretch of financial precarity or worse, will insist, sincerely, that the storm can be weathered.

Spreadsheet brain may squeak, weakly, that all the charts point down, but ape brain says must stay part of group, must keep group alive.

unreasonableness is a strength

We sometimes have to deprioritize correctness in our beliefs if it threatens our sense of safety and belonging. Okay.

But what if instead of just deprioritizing correctness, we offered it as a living sacrifice? What would we gain in return?

Consider religious traditions like circumcision, fasting, and executing valued cows. They don’t make sense considered in isolation. Why would behaviors that jeopardize our reproduction, weaken us, and decrease our wealth persist for thousands of years?

When we looked at startups, we saw a mix of believers and non-believers. In a mixed group, non-believers enjoy enormous advantage. While the chart points up and to the right, they collect pay, and because they lose less if the company fails, they are free to make big bets with a get-absolutely-filthy-rich-or-bust mindset. If those bets fail, the believers carry the consequences.

But what if you need real trust? What if you need to know your fellow group members will defend your family when the southern raiders show up looking hungry? In such interdependent groups, freeloading is a tragedy.

Compare the signals startups use to vet believers—do your job, show up, offer verbal affirmations—with the signals used by collectivist agricultural societies:

• Deny your own passions, work at your parents’ direction your entire life.
• Deny your own love, marry the partner your parents choose for you.
• Deny your self respect, accept your parents’ abuse until the end of their days, while you care for them. Then erect an altar.

If you knew someone had done these things, you would know, one-hundred percent, that they were a true believer in the collective. No one can fake signals so expensive.

And if you were the one who had sacrificed in this way, you would enjoy the trust of everyone, though it may be your only pleasure.

peroration: conform or get out

Though we prefer to experience our beliefs as reasoned conclusions, it’s more likely that our beliefs are simply indications of our position in ideological space.

Every country develops geographical poles of collectivism and individualism. Think east versus west coast United States, or Hà Nội versus Sài Gòn. This is because people born in collectivist societies who can’t bear the cost of the signals we discussed above must leave. The unmarried thirty-year-old woman, the man who won’t have children, the woman who wants to work, the man who won’t tolerate his parents’ neuroses, these people cannot stay and live as they please without endless pressure to conform from every family member, acquaintance, and stranger they encounter.

Even in the United States, where political polarization is extreme, people tend to switch sides if they move to an area where the opposite party dominates.

In the end, our beliefs tell us to whom we are attached, who we trust, and with whom we feel safe.