Picking up where I left off yesterday,  today I am going to examine how belief works in the human mind and attempt to correct some of the seemingly logical assumptions we liberal intellectual types tend to make about it that nevertheless lead us unto error.

We’ll head for the heart of the issue in a moment, but first, a simple fact must be established : there are layers of belief.

Our beliefs are not merely pages in a book, with all beliefs on equal footing. They are strictly ranked in layers according to importance to the individual.

That could be an article all by itself, but the layer I am interested in today is the outermost, lowest priority layer, which is the layer that deals with things which are entirely external to our lives.

Not completely irrelevant – then there would be neither need for nor stimulus to form a belief in the first place. But beliefs about things which are not part of our daily lives in any directly connected way, and therefore the penalty for incorrect belief is small if not entirely nonexistent. If you are wrong about the name of one of the craters of the Moon, unless you’re an astronomer or an astronaut, it will have very little impact on your life.

Being wrong about whether gravity works, on the other hand, could get you killed.

Political beliefs are part of the outer layers of beliefs. Not the outermost level, because our political beliefs are connected to both our morality and our understanding of how human nature and the world in general work.

But for the most part, being wrong – as in, believing politics which are not objectively true – is highly unlikely to have direct consequences on one’s life. There might be social consequences depending on where and when unpopular opinions are expressed, but other than that, the price of error is low.

That frees political beliefs from the burden of representing a true and actionable model of the world and lets it perform strictly psychological functions.

And that’s true for everything in those outer layers of belief. In theory, someone could believe that the moon is made of owl feces and that there’s no such thing as France and it would have very little impact on their lives as long as they kept it to themselves.

But of course, nobody would really believe that because despite being freed from some of the limitations of actionable objectivity, beliefs must still be consistent with everything else the person knows. That’s one verification process that cannot be bypassed without consequences in the form of cognitive dissonance.

So in order to believe that France is a myth, someone would have to think that everything they have ever seen or heard about France was a lie or a joke and that everyone who says they have been there or that they are from there are part of some enormous conspiracy to perpetuate fraud for unguessable reasons.

It’s possible to believe this, thanks to the miracles of modern conspiracy thinking’s handy toolkit of ways to believe whatever the fuck you want, but it would take a lot of work and would therefore have to fulfill a very deep psychological need.

Either that, or the person would have to be quite stupid. One of the things that makes it hard for liberal intellectuals like myself to grasp how someone could be indifferent to the Ultimate Truth™ of things is that they do not understand that the need for internal and external consistency in beliefs scales with IQ.

Essentially, the smarter the person, the more information can be mentally encompassed at the same time and that means that more information can be checked for consistency by the mind’s internal processes at the same time as well.

So beliefs which are glaringly inconsistent and/or massively hypocritical to us are less so to people of average intelligence. This leads to the usual sort of angst and frustration on the part of us brainy types because we can’t BELIEVE that people don’t SEE it.

High IQ grants many powers but comes with many costs. We’d be better off if we could make some sort of peace with our roles as, well, shepherds  for the flock, but that is too inconsistent with the noble egalitarian ethos of modern democratic society.

Back to the subject. Basically, my thesis^[1] is that people’s beliefs are a combination of what they must believe (due to things like the consistency check) and what they need to believe because it satisfies a deep emotional need.

A racist redneck Neo-Nazi, for example, might believe in their racial superiority because that belief is what they have used to counter the massive amount of societal messages about their inferiority compared to normal, decent, middle class folk.

And because they have a lower cognitive consistency demand, the fact that those smug middle class people are mostly also white people

Somehow, when these Nazi types think about “the white race”, I don’t think they are imagining wimpy gay intellectual liberals like myself.

I must admit, though, that physically, I could pass for a big fat Bubba type redneck easily. When people think “intellectual”, they are usually not imagining someone who looks like me either.

It’s very common today for us liberal intellectual types to throw up our hands at people like Trump supporting Fox News watchers and declare that these people have divorced themselves from reality entirely.

And that’s true…. for a given value of reality. Because they are incapable and/or unwilling to change their minds based on new information, their political reality has to be absurdly flexible. They have no choice but to believe what they are told to believe.

But of course, were their concept of everyday reality so slippery, they would lose all ability to function in the world.

Makes me wonder what would happen if Donald Trump said that gravity was a liberal lie concocted by the fake news media.

Would they goad each other into jumping off skyscrapers?

Or would they finally snap out of it?

Good thing it’s only a thought experiment.

I really could not be trusted with power.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.