Bullshit Is a Choice

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

In 2012, the Christian rock band Phillips, Craig, and Dean released an adorable song called “I Choose to Believe.” Here’s a snippet of the lyrics:

I choose to believe

And never give up hope

God is good

He's in control

I'll keep the faith

I trust in His way

And even when His face is hard to see

I choose to believe

On one reading, the lyrics are preposterous. Even if my life depended on it, I could not choose to believe that, say, 1 + 1 = 5. My brain would not be capable of it. I also have no choice but to believe that “There’s a coffee mug on the table” or “I have a dentist appointment at 2:00.” 

On another reading, the lyrics make sense. Some beliefs can be chosen. It seems like I could choose to believe that “people are fundamentally good,” or that “education is a basic human right,” or that “there’s more to life than money.” 

According to the philosopher Neil Van Leeuwen, both readings of the song are correct. We have two types of beliefs in our heads: regular beliefs (e.g., “There’s a coffee mug on the table”) and credences (e.g., “Everything happens for a reason”). 

Regular beliefs are involuntary—you have no choice but to believe them. Credences are voluntary: you can “choose” to believe them, in the same way Phillips, Craig, and Dean choose to believe that god is good and in control, even when his face is hard to see.

Regular beliefs actively guide behavior: if I think the coffee cup is to my right, I’ll reach for it on my right. Credences are inert: if I think Jesus is my homeboy or everything happens for a reason, well… it’s not really clear what I should do with that information. 

This distinction—between beliefs and credences, or between world models and social signals—gets my vote for being the most important insight in cognitive science in the last two decades. I don’t have the space to fully explore its implications, so I’ll just focus on a couple here.

First, bullshit is a kind of credence. After all, if our regular beliefs were full of shit, we’d be constantly walking off cliffs, eating bars of soap, and generally being dysfunctional. So our regular beliefs are mostly true (or true enough), and they often operate unconsciously. It is our credences—the thoughts we conspicuously think about abstract, distant, political, spiritual, groupy, or signaly things—that are full of shit. Which makes sense, because we pay no price for them being wrong. They don’t guide our behavior the way regular beliefs do.

There’s another important implication: if you’re looking for a decent cue of someone’s trustworthiness on a topic, try to assess how involuntary their belief seems to be. If they seem like they were dragged kicking and screaming toward the belief—blindsided by the sheer force of reality—then their belief is probably of the regular type, and it’s probably not bullshit. On the other hand, if their belief seems eagerly chosen or all-too-convenient for them, then it’s probably a credence, and it’s probably bullshit. 

Yes, this cue can be gamed. People can pretend like they were dragged kicking and screaming toward a belief when they actually hand-picked it to serve their agenda. But people will only game this cue if they expect others to use it. Right now though, it doesn’t seem like many other people are using it (at least not that I’m aware of). So maybe give it a shot? 

Then again, maybe you shouldn’t use this cue on other people at all. Maybe you should use it on yourself. Because if you don’t use it on yourself, it will quickly morph into an excuse to dismiss everyone you already disliked—a cudgel to wield against your social and political rivals. 

So rather than asking whether those other idiots “chose” their beliefs, turn your attention inward—psychologize the psychologist. “How involuntary are my beliefs? Did I choose to believe them, or eagerly sign up for them, or cozily ease into them? Or was I forced to believe them against my will, with reality crashing into me like a freight train?” 

I recently asked these questions of myself, and it was a sobering exercise. It made me reflect on my intellectual journey over the years. I think my worldview came out of the exercise pretty unscathed, but you be the judge. 

My intellectual journey

A lot of people assume I’m a cynical person. It’s an understandable assumption, given the content of this blog. I’m certainly a Darwinian cynic, but I’m not a cynical person—or at least, that’s not my natural temperament.  

I’m more of a softie. I trust people by default. I rarely suspect others of ill intent. I’ve never endorsed any conspiracy theories. I don’t hate anyone and never have. I love children, and people say I’m unusually good with them. I earnestly sing the Barney theme song to my daughter because I love her and she loves me and we’re a happy family. 

And though I’m anti-ideology, anti-partisan, and sympathetic to anarchism, I didn’t always hold these views. I used to be a good, wholesome, liberal democrat who believed in hope and change and political progress. I chose to study political psychology for my PhD, instead of other topics, because I wanted to understand the people who disagreed with me. My goal was to change their hearts and minds by showing them the light of reason. 

I even believed in values—equality, diversity, honor, authenticity, self-actualization, etc. My goal was to figure out how these sacred values of ours might have evolved—what functions they might serve. My dream was to write a cool academic paper called “An Evolutionary Theory of Values.” So I tried and tried to come up with a workable theory, and I failed and failed. I repeatedly came up with dumb theories and quickly realized why they were dumb. It felt like banging my head against a wall. At some point, it dawned on me that I was pursuing an impossible goal. Genuine values and Darwinism were incompatible. You cannot explain the former in terms of the latter. Genuine values are supposed to lie beyond self-interest, nepotism, and alliances, while being costly to their adherents, thereby ruling out the only possible ways they could have been favored by natural selection. So I realized our values must be bullshit, and set out to come up with an evolutionary theory of why we pretend to have these bullshit values. I think I came up with a pretty good one here.

And believe it or not, I even used to believe in the pursuit of happiness. I wanted to be happy—or I thought I did. Then I started meditating (kind of obsessively), got weirdly good at it, to the point where I could make myself happy at will, and then I realized that happiness was just kind of… boring. This is it? The pinnacle of human existence? The meaning of life? Meh. 

Then I lost my desire to meditate. Then the entire WEIRD mythology of happiness and self-care and self-actualization came crashing down on me. I realized all those things were, themselves, bullshit values—the very things I had been trying to explain. Then I started asking more questions. What about suffering? What about morality? What about the meaning of life? What about my own desire to write about these ideas—to be interesting? Were these things bullshit too? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. I could hear the theme from 2001 A Space Odyssey playing, as an obelisk emerged before me, inscribed with three words: everything is bullshit.

So I shattered my ideology, debunked my values, and destroyed my pursuit of happiness, by learning about them. Insight can be destructive. As Darwin knew all too well, a powerful explanation can be like an acid that eats through everything. 

The devastation hasn’t always been fun. It’s been pretty alienating to believe this stuff at times. It occasionally makes me sad, too. A close friend of mine said he could detect an undercurrent of lost innocence in my writing, and it doesn’t surprise me he could sense it. I’ve had my dark nights of the soul, and I’ve even lost a few status points. 

Then again, surely I’ve gained more status points than I’ve lost. Contrarianism gets people’s attention, and there’s a side of me that likes to ruffle feathers and rouse rabbles. Surely I was enticed by the most provocative, interesting beliefs I could find. Surely I got excited by the prospect of these spicy beliefs being true or plausible, because successfully defending more uncommon positions means being smarter than a larger number of people. I’m only human.

But I’m not a troll. I’m not trying to provoke for its own sake. I only try to provoke when I think a provocative claim is actually correct—or at least, very plausible. This isn’t performance art. The things I write here are my actual views. So far, I haven’t encountered any arguments or data that seriously challenge them. 

And I’m open to being wrong! I hunger for it. To have a thoughtful person politely show me why I’m wrong, and cause me to change my mind, is my dream. Whenever that happens, it is exhilarating. Part of the goal of putting these ideas out there is to see if anyone can tell me why I’m wrong, and give me something more insightful to believe. 

This hasn’t happened yet. Most of the comments here have been written in a kind of reluctant, confused agreement. People don’t really disagree or have any better ideas. They just don’t know how to accommodate the massive bolus of cynicism into their cerebrums. 

So it doesn’t look like any of my readers chose to agree with me, if they do. And I can tell you, to the best of my (admittedly biased) knowledge, I did not choose these beliefs. They chose me. And there have been times in my life when I wished they hadn’t—but also times when I’ve been glad they did. They’re a mixed bag. 

Which makes sense. If they were all upside and no downside, they would look suspiciously like choices, and I do not choose to believe—or at least, I aspire not to. 

Sing it with me now!

I do not choose to believe

And often give up hope

God is dumb

No one’s in control

I'll ditch the faith

I trust in Darwin’s way

And even when something’s nice to believe

I do not choose to believe