Sounds pretty butch, no? But alas, that’s not the sense in which I mean those words.

What I am going to talk about today is along the lines of the thoughts on superstition I have had before, but expanding on that delicate barrier between what we think might happen and what we “know” WILL happen.

I have touched on this subject before when I talked about why we lock our doors. Briefly, we do that because we feel like if we don’t lock our doors when we leave, a burglar will come and steal all of our valuable stuff.

You could say “If you don’t lock your door, a burglar will get in” to any audience at all and everyone will nod affirmatively. Same goes for locking your car. The relationship is clear : action A will result in consequence B.

But it is by no means that certain. Sure, if you leave your house or car unlocked, someone might break in and steal your stuff (or the whole damned car), but the actual odds of it are pretty low.

And if you point this out to people, they will grudgingly admit that yes, it’s a risk, not a certainty. But it will make them uncomfortable and they won’t want to dwell on the subject. And odds are, they will go right on thinking of it as a certainty.

Why? What leads to this fundamental malfunction in reasoning?

That’s our starting point, but what I really want to talk about today is how this odd malfunction maps to differences in personality. Specifically, the “carefree/careless” versus “worried/careful” axis.

This could also be seen as the old optimism versus pessimism axis, but that doesn’t really do it justice. However, it provides a useful pair of words, so I will use that axis when I talk about this subject below.

Perhaps the real definition of a pessimist is “someone who sees negative possibilities as certainties”, and their level of pessimism corresponds exactly with both the number of those things they see as virtual certainties and the distance between possibility and certainty in their minds.

This would suggest that some people would be far more prone to things like phobias, anxiety, and ultimately depression. The tendency to see negatives as certainties (and positives as untrustworthy) creates a worldview in which the world is full of horrifying certainties and the best you can hope for is to manage to avoid the myriad disasters that surround them at all times, waiting for us to drop our guard so they can strike.

This is clearly an unwarranted and damaging distortion of reality and one that requires a belief that the world is basically malign and “out to get you”.

But it can’t be out to get you, because it isn’t a person. In order to have ill intent, the universe would need a mind, a personality, and emotions. That requires it to have some level of sentience. And it just plain doesn’t.

At least, for us nontheists. The religious are free to think God (by whatever name) has it out for them. One of the main functions of theistic religion is to provide someone to get mad at when things go wrong.

But if you do not believe in some version of God, that you can’t think the world is out to get you. Or that it loves you, either.

And yet many people who do not consider themselves religious nevertheless go around with these negative delusions without giving them a second thought. Superstition, it seems, is inevitable and therefore unavoidable.

Personally, I would rather have positive delusions that my current negative ones. At least then I would happy. And my error rate would remain around the same.

On the brain level, one could say that negative/depressed people make negative neuronal patterns more readily than positive. Some part of their mind makes this determination, and it is that part which is fundamentally broken in pessimists and their outliers, the depressed and the down.

In realtime, the subjective experience of this malfunction is in interpretation, as demonstrated by the whole “glass half empty/ half full” metaphor. Two individuals react differently to the exact same stimulus, and the key is in how they interpret it.

This difference might seem trivial when looking at a glass of water, but they become extremely significant when looking at relationships, interactions, and life in general. Indeed, if two people can come away from the exact same experience with radically different interpretations, one of which leads to misery, then the difference is extremely significant.

So if you know you have negative bias to your perceptions, how do you change that?

The first step is, I think, to learn to withhold judgment. When you feel yourself going down the negative spiral, stop yourself and simply withhold judgment for a moment. Try to work your way back to what is triggering the negative spiral (the one that starts at “I just spilled the milk” and ends with “I am a horrible, horrible person and I don’t deserve to live”) and try to put it in perspective. Is it really that bad? Can you say for sure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen to “normal” people? Are you judging yourself the way you would judge someone else who did that?

By withholding judgment instead of trying to insert the opposite judgment, you avoid having to fight the basic grain of a negative personality. Maybe you will reach the exact same conclusion as you were about to make before you took a time out. Maybe you won’t. You aren’t trying to convince yourself that a bad thing is good.

You’re just saying that might not be quite as bad as you thought it was.

This is a cognitive solution, and cognitive solutions aren’t easy. They take a lot of effort in monitoring your own thought processes so you can stop the negative ones and insert better ones in their place.

But over time, you can rewrite old patterns with new, and before you know it, you will at least be at neutral.

And for those of us who have been lost in our own shadows for a long long time, neutral would be a victory.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.