Why You’re Always Right
My cat refuses all medicine because she doesn’t understand the benefits. Nothing can make her see that having bitter liquid squirted into her mouth will prevent her from getting intestinal worms.
So I have to force the matter by wrapping her in a towel like a burrito, so that she can’t fight back. I’m sure she sees it as pointless cruelty.
Because of her erroneous views and suspicious nature, I have to trick her to make this happen. To get a cat who rejects modern medicine into a towel-burrito, experts say to lay the towel flat on the floor for a day or two, occasionally leaving a treat in the middle. The cat will soon start loitering around the towel, eventually laying on it, waiting for it to produce its magic bounty. Then you spring the trap.
Even after that, the cat will still worship this mysterious, treat-giving towel. It’s been two years since I’ve had to give my cat medicine, but she will still keep vigil, eyes hopeful, on any towel left laying flat somewhere. I’ve turned her into a sort of one-cat cargo cult.
Of course, I can see exactly how she misunderstands the situation. The light of my knowledge shines in places that are dark to her. I know I’m giving her vital medicine; she thinks I’m humiliating her for no reason.
In hindsight, it is possible that she’s right and I’m wrong. Maybe this dewormer stuff is snake oil, sold to me by a crooked veterinarian, and I’m just humiliating her out of a nonsense belief that cats get “worms” in their bodies if you don’t squirt this special formula into their mouths. Now who’s the cultist?
It’s true that I could have done some research to evaluate that possibility. I didn’t, because I already felt like I knew.
The job of a belief is to look like reality
If you try to remember the moment you came to “know” a given thing, you usually can’t pinpoint it. You might remember reading it somewhere, or hearing people say it. In any case, it’s unlikely you got it from an unassailable chain of logic and deduction.
If a new idea seems to jive with other things you’ve read or heard, it will probably become canonical to your worldview right there and then. Now it’s just another thing you “know,” whether or not it’s true.
Beliefs are tricky in that they’re just thoughts, but they blend into reality like chameleons. If you wake up on a Thursday and believe it’s Friday, you experience that day as a Friday like any other, until the moment you don’t believe it’s Friday anymore. The job of a belief is to stand in for truth, to look and feel exactly like it, whether or not it ultimately corresponds to reality.
Everyone is the one exception to the rule
To stay sane in the age of angry opinion-havers, it’s helpful to recognize that beliefs have this chameleon quality built right into them. They always look like truths, as long as they’re yours.
Think of beliefs like dollar bills, in a world where many or most dollar bills are counterfeit. They get passed around freely, most never come under real examination, and tons of them are bogus.
The crazy-making part is that each person regards each of their dollars as genuine currency. After all, if you thought one of your bills was counterfeit, you’d throw it away, so it wouldn’t be yours anymore.
This means that to you, all of your beliefs always appear right. Someone else might identify some of them as funny money, when you insist that sharks don’t get cancer, or when you share your solution to Israel-Palestine at the dinner table. Yet each person can’t help but regard all of their own current beliefs as the real deal, otherwise they wouldn’t believe them.
This is an extremely weird condition to be in, and we’re all in it. The only reason to think you’ve got things right, that the world you see is the real world, is that you’re you.
The worst hobby
Bad things happen when you combine the self-affirming nature of beliefs with a habit of consuming lots of morally-charged content.
Many people make a daily routine of consuming large quantities of highly partisan content about “what’s going on” in “the” “world.” Enthusiasts of this hobby call it “staying informed,” and insist it isn’t just a personal habit but a civic duty.
This content consists of new beliefs (“news” for short) about what happened today or yesterday, presented with an authoritative tone and little moral ambiguity. They identify clear villains and clear implications. They often give instructions from hand-selected experts on how smart people should think about this.
The only filter on the consumer end is whether these new beliefs seem to jive with existing ones. They usually do, because most of those existing beliefs were gained the same way. The moral of every news story is, “You’re right again!”
A chronic side-effect of this hobby is righteous hatred for people not in accordance with your sense that you are right again, even when the issues are admittedly complex. Why can’t that guy have only non-counterfeit bills, like I do?! He believes a thing that isn’t true! What a bad person!
Political actors, who thrive on simple narratives and inter-class hatred, encourage this worst hobby.
A simple habit for staying sane
So what do we do, given that all of us carry lots of fake dollars, and they all look absolutely real?
Aside from taking frequent, long breaks from the worst hobby ever, one powerful defense against the “I’m the exception” problem was suggested by eccentric writer Robert Anton Wilson.
He recommended adding a habitual “maybe” to your inner and outer pronouncements, even if (or especially if) you don’t think it’s warranted.
- That policy is exactly what we need. Maybe.
- I can’t get anything done in the evenings. Maybe.
- Anyone who believes [blank] is an idiot. Maybe.
- There’s no good reason to vote for that person. Maybe.
- Astrology is total nonsense. Maybe.
This indiscriminate maybe doesn’t tell you which beliefs are right. But it reminds you that you don’t only possess true beliefs, and that your bad ones always look like good ones.
It also makes your statement more palatable to most people, and probably more true.
More importantly, it undermines hatred and fanaticism. It’s hard to imagine righteous violence sustaining itself in the presence of any amount of “maybe.”
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Last call for Raptitude Field Trip!
There’s still time to sign up for Raptitude Field Trip 2.
Here’s how I described it before:
The Field Trip is a fun and lightweight mini-course for helping people discover the hidden riches in day-to-day life, which is what this blog is all about. I try to keep the whole program about as cheap as ordering a large pizza.
It starts officially on February 10 so don’t wait. (You can sneak in a little late but not too late.)
Why do we have Raptitude Field Trips? This post explains.
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