Pseudobeliefs

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If there’s a master key to everything I’ve written on this blog, it’s the prefix “pseudo.”

In Arguing Is Bullshit, I argued that many of our apparent “arguments” are pseudoarguments. When we debate our conservative uncle at Thanksgiving, or spar with Rando756 on Twitter, we’re rarely trying to change their minds. More often, we’re trying to posture, pontificate, trap them in “gotchas,” impugn their tribe, insult their intelligence, make them feel bad, silence them, punish them for speaking out against us, and defend our honor (or our tribe’s honor) in the eyes of onlookers. Since doing all this ugly stuff makes us look ugly, we pretend that what we’re really doing is trying to change their minds. You know, because we care about “truth” or “logic” or whatever. Speaking of caring about stuff…

In Status Is Weird (and my related academic paper), I argued that many of our apparent values are pseudovalues. We talk as if we’re pursuing noble ideals—truth, happiness, authenticity, equality, diversity, self-actualization, universal beneficence—because it sounds better than what we’re ultimately pursuing: status, power, and moral superiority. Since openly thirsting for status lowers our status, being blatantly power-hungry robs us of power, and acting holier than thou makes us look morally inferior, we pretend to care about “higher things” that have nothing to do with status, power, and moral superiority (our “values”), as a way of surreptitiously and effectively competing for status, power, and moral superiority.

Unfortunately, the prefix “pseudo” is a bit misleading. It seems to imply a certain amount of treachery—a conscious intent to deceive people. But cult members do not see their sacred creeds as verbal diarrhea: they see them as a window onto the ultimate nature of reality. Rando756 is not aware he’s in a pseudoargument: he fancies himself a torchbearer of the Enlightenment. So the kind of bullshit that most interests me is the kind that doesn’t feel like bullshit from the inside. It feels pure and wholesome, like the truth.

I’d like to coin a new word, pseudofication, to describe the transformation from real to pseudo. As we will see, pseudofication occurs inside of people as well as between them. The most familiar example is pseudoscience. The reason why pseudoscience exists is because science exists, which is a serious, prestigious thing. Pseudofication happens when people try to mimic the trappings of science to appear more serious and prestigious to onlookers. Sometimes, they succeed and gain a cult following. Other times, they fail and become the object of mockery.

Pseudofication is analogous to “Batesian mimicry” in evolutionary biology. This is when a non-poisonous species mimics a poisonous species to avoid predation. If a black-and-white butterfly is poisonous, and a black-and-orange one is not, then birds will evolve to eschew the former and chew on the latter. This creates a new selection pressure: the black-and-orange butterflies evolve to become less distinguishable from the black-and-white ones. Then the birds evolve keener eyesight (to tell apart the fakes from the real McCoys), the butterflies’ disguises become more impeccable, and so on. In the case of the Papilio polytes butterfly, the liars won the arms race. They’re not poisonous, but they’re indistinguishable from Pachliopta hector, which is.

In humans, pseudofication occurs in real time rather than evolutionary time. Here’s how pseudofication works in the cultural realm:

1. People pick up on a real cue in the world—a correlation between a behavior (e.g., highfalutin words) and something they want, like seriousness or prestigiousness.

2. People mimic the behavior (e.g., parrot the words), to increase the chance that someone will confuse them for a serious, prestigious person.

3. Audiences scramble to differentiate the mimics from the real McCoys.

From here, there are a number of outcomes that can result:

1. The mimics win the arms race

The system settles into a kind of stable parasitism where a cult leader tricks his followers into worshiping the volcano spirits or postmodernist bafflegab consumes academia.

2. The audience wins the arms race

The mimicry gets called out, the emperor’s nudity gets revealed, and the mimics get laughed at, ostracized, or voted out of office.

3. The audience and the real McCoys both win

The two sides work together to devise a hard-to-fake signal, filter, or barrier that separates the real McCoys from the phonies. Maybe it’s a PhD from a fancy university. Maybe it’s a set of peer-reviewed publications in prominent journals. The filter works well enough, and everyone’s happy—except the mimics, who complain about how the establishment is rigged against them.

4. The mimics and the audience both win

Huh? Let me explain. Imagine there’s a woman who’s extraordinarily good at acting like she cares about marginalized groups—like, Meryl Streep level—even though she doesn’t give a shit deep down. Suppose her talent is so massive that she’s guaranteed to rise to the top of any “woke” social hierarchy. If you’re playing the “woke” status game alongside her, then it will benefit you to be fooled by her performances—to award her virtue for her virtuosity. Yes, you’re paying a cost for being deceived about her character (in both senses of the term), but you’re also gaining the benefit of cozying up to someone who will soon rise to the top of your social hierarchy. If the benefit of cozying up to her outweighs the cost of being deceived by her, then you both come out ahead, with her at the top and you alongside her. It’s a kind of symbiotic deception. I’ve argued that this is how “charisma” works.

5. Wait, what did I just read?

Sorry, I put a lot out there. Don’t worry if you’re a bit lost—I’ll circle back to this stuff later. But before we circle back, I’ll need to tell you a little story. Trust me: there’s a big intellectual payoff waiting for you at the other side of it.

The parable of Ashanti

Once upon a time, there was a hunter-gatherer named Hunter. After returning from a week-long excursion in the woods, Hunter had an incredible story to tell. On his journeys, he encountered a five-horned goddess named Ashanti. Ashanti counseled him on how to usher in a new age of peace and plenty for Hunter’s tribe. This new golden age would only come about, according to the goddess, if other members of the tribe supported Hunter as their new leader.

The response to Hunter’s story was mixed. Some people thought he was full of shit—that he cooked up a fairy tale to gain power. Others were agnostic, but open to the idea that he might be telling the truth. And a few other people, namely the ones closest to him, sort of believed him, or were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

In other words, there was significant variation in how skeptical people were of Hunter’s story. And importantly, the variation was nonrandom. Those who were most loyal to Hunter were the least skeptical, while those who were the least loyal were the most skeptical.

All of a sudden there arose, from the depths of human psychology, a valid cue of loyalty to Hunter. And that cue was: belief in Ashanti. Given that loyalties live inside the darkness of our skulls, are very hard to detect, and very important to detect for a backstabbing, Machiavellian species like ours, belief in Ashanti becomes an extremely valuable piece of political information.

How so? Well, let’s say a woman named Gatherer totally believes in Ashanti. If her belief seems sincere, then that reveals something about where her loyalties lie. If you were secretly trying to mobilize an anti-Hunter coalition, you could be very confident about whom to approach: not her.

But of course, whenever a valid piece of social information gets discovered, the pseudofication process begins, as surely as objects fall to the earth when dropped. Gradually, people begin pretending to believe in Ashanti for savvy political reasons. Anyone who wants to advertise their loyalty to Hunter waxes poetic about the beautiful horns of Ashanti and her glorious prophecy, even if they secretly hate Hunter’s guts.

So let’s say Hunter ends up becoming the new leader. Now things have really changed. Now everyone will have an even stronger incentive to pretend to believe in Ashanti. If anyone calls bullshit on the whole story, that will signal to everyone that they are a heretic—an enemy of the group’s leader—and by implication, an enemy of the group. In the new Hunter-led regime, skeptics will have to stay quiet and tread carefully.

But now the tribe has a problem. The validity of the original cue—i.e., the correlation between Ashanti belief and loyalty to Hunter—has been destroyed. Now everyone is tripping over themselves to sing the praises of Ashanti, including Hunter’s enemies. There’s no more variation in the cue to exploit for political decision making. So now people need a new cue of loyalty to Hunter—something more useful. Hmm, what could the new cue be?

Well, it will have to come down to putting your money where your mouth is. Do you pray to Ashanti every morning? Do you sacrifice animals to her? Are you willing to allow Hunter to inseminate your wife to fulfill Ashanti’s prophecy? Are you happy that Hunter chose your wife for this honor, or are you upset about this? These are the new cues people use to infer loyalty to Hunter: participation in costly rituals, ceremonies, and sacrifices.

What’s interesting is that now we’ve reached an equilibrium. Signaling loyalty to Hunter has become so costly and onerous that only the true loyalists are willing to pay the costs. The skeptics will have to either flee the tribe or face the risk of execution at the hands of Hunter’s allies. A new social hierarchy has emerged, with Hunter at the top, followed by those who are willing to make the biggest sacrifices to Ashanti (or, rather, to Hunter), followed by those who are willing to make the second-biggest sacrifices, and so on.

It’s worth retracing the causal steps that led to this peculiar outcome. What began as a lie that Hunter made up to gain power became: 1) a useful cue of loyalty to Hunter, followed by 2) a deceptive signal of loyalty to Hunter (i.e., pseudofication), followed by 3) a useless cue of loyalty to Hunter (after the pseudofication happened), followed by 4) an honest signal of loyalty to Hunter in the form of painful rituals and sacrifices.

All these rituals and sacrifices are, it is worth reminding you, moves in a convoluted status game. The tribesmen are, at the end of the day, a bunch of primates competing to form an alliance with the reigning alpha male. And what do we know about status games? Well, if you were paying attention, you will remember that they revolve around pseudovalues—the things that status-seekers claim to be pursuing but are not actually pursuing, in order to gain status without looking like they care about status.

We can now see why, in this case, the pseudovalue matters. If any of the tribesmen blurted out the truth—that Ashanti isn’t real, and they’re just a bunch of status-obsessed primates competing to form an alliance with the reigning alpha male—then well, whoever blurted that out is not going very far in life. They’ll probably get executed.

To ascend the social ladder in this brave new world, the tribesmen have to avoid the truth—that Ashanti is a load of shit—at all costs. They have to convince as many people as possible that they are true believers. And not just true believers, but bigger true believers than their social competitors—so stupendously devoted to Ashanti that they are, perhaps, willing to die for her.

We now have something like a little religion, and what’s interesting is that it arises naturally without the need for any special cognitive equipment. We don’t need to assume that there is a “religion module” or “god-shaped hole” to explain any of this stuff. All we need to assume is some rather basic abilities that we know humans have, namely: 1) an ability to make shit up, 2) an ability to evaluate others’ loyalty, and 3) an ability to (deceptively) signal their loyalty.

The moral of the story

And now it is time for the punchline. It is entirely possible, indeed plausible, that in the midst of all these Ashanti-related rituals and sacrifices, no one actually believes in Ashanti. Yes, belief in Ashanti could merely be a social signal, like the myriad social signals we send to each other every day. Ashanti belief is not guiding anyone’s behavior in any concrete, practical way, aside from the performances they put on for their pious peers.

For example, the tribesman might say that Ashanti will bless them with strong winds on their seafaring journey, but they’ll still prepare enough supplies to last them if winds are weak. They might say they’re 1000% confident that Ashanti will keep them safe in battle, but they’ll still wear armor and attack their enemy under cover of darkness, with fear and trepidation in their hearts. What the tribesmen have is a pseudobelief in Ashanti—something that masquerades as a genuine belief, for the purpose of getting ahead in the social world.

You probably have a lot of questions here. The first one might be: “Wait, people don’t like being lied to. If a signal is deceptive, recipients will evolve to—or learn to—stop listening. All this deceptive Ashanti business seems really precarious. Wouldn’t the whole thing fall apart?”

No, it wouldn’t. Remember symbiotic deception? This is when a lie (e.g., caring about marginalized groups) is correlated with something true (e.g., future status in “woke” subcultures) which makes it beneficial for certain people (e.g., “woke” people) to accept the lie. To take another example, consider a loyal flunky who showers his boss with preposterous flattery that isn’t fully sincere. If the lie (flattery) is connected to an underlying truth (loyalty), then the boss benefits from accepting the flattery. Something similar is happening in our little religion.

The person who sacrifices his goat to Ashanti is lying in some sense. He does not truly believe that sacrificing his goat will appease Ashanti because he doesn’t believe in Ashanti. But he is also telling the truth in some sense. He really is loyal to Hunter—so loyal that he’s willing to sacrifice a goat to prove it.

If we look at things from Hunter’s perspective, the information contained in the slaughtered goat is valuable. Hunter is getting an honest signal of loyalty from the goat’s entrails. Yes, he’s also getting lied to: the goat-killer doesn’t really believe in Ashanti. But if the benefit of the loyalty signal outweighs the cost of the Ashanti lie, then Hunter benefits from accepting the information.

Another question you might have is: “Are you saying that people are consciously lying to each other about Ashanti the whole time? That they’re all perfectly aware that the Ashanti thing is a load of shit, and they’re all just biting their tongues?”

No, I’m not saying that. Instead, what I’m saying is something far more interesting: the members of the Ashanti religion genuinely believe that they believe in Ashanti. And they genuinely believe that the other tribesmen genuinely believe in Ashanti. Even though, deep down, nobody actually believes in Ashanti.

Huh? How could that happen? Well, it could happen if people don’t know what their true beliefs are. It could happen if people don’t have access to their core values and convictions. It could happen if people figure out what’s going on in their unconscious minds the same way they figure out what’s going on in other people’s unconscious minds. It could happen if people use much of the same neural machinery for inferring their own mental states as they do for inferring other people’s mental states. It could happen if, as decades of psychological research tells us, people are largely strangers to themselves, confabulating plausible-sounding reasons for most of what they do (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).

Given that we are largely strangers to ourselves, this has a very important implication. If I successfully convince you that I’m devoted to Ashanti—that belief in her prophecy is the best explanation for all my goat slaughtering or whatever—then that will, as a side effect, convince me that I’m devoted to Ashanti. Because if I’m figuring out my deeper convictions the same way you are, then convincing you and convincing me are the same project.

You see, it is much easier to deceive myself about the nature of my unconscious mind than it is to deceive myself about external reality (if that is even possible). If I’m holding an apple behind my back, and I’m trying to trick you into thinking there’s no apple behind my back, then tricking you won’t trick me as a side effect. Because I can feel the apple in my hand. The texture and weight of the apple are conscious perceptions that I have direct access to—and that contradict my lie.

But if I’m trying to trick you into thinking I’m devoted to Ashanti, I have no access to the truth about whether I’m devoted to Ashanti. The innermost workings of my mind are opaque to me. I have no equivalent to the apple in my hand—no conscious perception to contradict what I’m telling you. So insofar as I am a stranger to myself, anything that will effectively convince you about my devotion will, as a side effect, convince me about my devotion.

Or here’s an even weirder thing: I might make the signals behavioral—like, I might sacrifice a goat, drink some hallucinogenic blood, or let Hunter sleep with my wife—for the purpose of convincing everyone that I’m more devoted to Ashanti than they are. As a side effect, I will end up convincing myself that I’m more devoted to Ashanti than they are. “Wow, I’m the most pious person in the tribe!” When it comes to beliefs about ourselves—who we are deep down—deception and self-deception go hand in hand.

This is, of course, the classic theory of self-deception proposed by the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers: we deceive ourselves to more effectively deceive others. But I’d like to make an amendment to the Trivers theory. The synergy between deception and self-deception is confined to a specific domain: the contents of our unconscious minds—who we are deep down.

I find this amended theory of self-deception more plausible than the original Trivers account. Self-deception about our unconscious minds is more likely to be favored by natural selection than self-deception about observable reality. Why? Because it is less costly, in Darwinian terms, to deceive ourselves about who we are deep down than it is to deceive ourselves about the world of apples, plants, and animals. I wouldn’t want to deceive myself into thinking the poison ivy is safe to touch or the tiger is safe to approach. But in a hypersocial, Machiavellian species like ours, I might want to deceive myself into thinking I’m a true believer in Ashanti.

A leap of faith

Let’s take a concrete example. Let’s say I deceive myself into thinking I can fly—that I have magical flying powers. That kind of self-deception is a problem. At some point, I will spread my arms, jump off a cliff, and fall to my death. Genes that lead to outcomes like that will fall off the cliff with their carriers.

But now suppose I do something slightly different: I deceive myself into thinking that I believe I can fly—that when I say things like “I have magical flying powers,” I sincerely believe what I’m saying. Here, I’ve merely deceived myself about my own mind—not the laws of physics. Assuming my brain still knows, deep down, that I can’t fly, this kind of self-deception won’t be such a problem for me. It is a purely social belief. It might cause me to go around saying, in a perfectly sincere way, that I can fly. But these are just words, and if there’s one thing we know about Homo sapiens, it’s that sincerely spouting preposterous words and having lots of babies are perfectly compatible.

Okay, but then what if someone calls me out? What if a guy says, “Hey, if you can fly, then why don’t you jump off this cliff right now and prove it?” Well, if that happens, then I will feel a very powerful, mysterious urge, from deep within myself, to not jump off that cliff. I won’t know where the urge is coming from or why it exists. But then again, none of us really know where our urges come from or why they exist, do we? But that doesn’t stop us from making up bullshit.

“Why did you look so scared when I asked you to jump off the cliff?” the guy might ask. It’s a great question, and by the time he’s asked it, my brain has prepared a menu of confabulations: “I can’t fly on command because that’s not how my flying powers work.” Or: “I can only fly when the stars align or when I’m overcome with true happiness or something.” Worst case scenario? I draw a blank: “I know I can fly—I truly believe I can—but for some reason, I’m feeling a very powerful, mysterious urge to avoid jumping off that cliff.”

I think much of religious belief is like this. Deep down, most people don’t actually believe in the doctrines of their religion. They’re just trying really hard to convince everyone that they’re true believers, by performing the relevant rituals and uttering the relevant incantations. These performances can be very effective, convincing both the audience and the performer simultaneously. Over time, every member of a religion can come to believe that every member of the religion is a true believer. Even if nobody actually is.

This is what a growing number of cognitive scientists now think about religion (1, 2, 3, 4). Religious people sincerely believe that they believe their religious doctrines, and behave in ways that convince others (and themselves) of their sincerity, but they don’t actually believe their religious doctrines. Religious dogma is pseudogma. Religious values are pseudovalues.

We don’t actually believe most of what we think we believe

I think a large percentage of our explicit beliefs—at least 50%, probably more—are pseudobeliefs. A lot of the time we think we believe something, we don’t actually believe it deep down. We just pretend to believe it to fit in with our congregation, rally our political tribes, sound smart, avoid looking hypocritical, defend our character, or impress our peers. And of course, in doing this we often convince ourselves that we’re true believers. Remember: pseudobeliefs feel like true beliefs from the inside.

Here’s a list of beliefs that I strongly suspect are pseudobeliefs:

1. Heaven

I’m about to take my daughter to Disneyland, and boy am I excited. I’m not only going to get splashed with a wave of fun and nostalgia (and water), I’m going to vicariously experience the childlike wonder of Disneyland through her eyes.

If heaven is real, then it is better than Disneyland. And not just a little bit better, but like infinitely better. It is an unfathomably awesome place where you get to hang out with the creator of the universe who’s infinitely cool in every way, and relish immortal bliss with infinite yummy food, carnal delights, or whatever mind-blowing shit is supposed to be going on up there.

If anyone truly believes they’re going to heaven—like truly believes it—then they should be feeling the greatest excitement a human is capable of feeling. The closer they are to death, the more excited they should feel. They should be pumped to die. If they’re on their deathbed or in hospice care, they should be over the fucking moon.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard of a dying person who felt this way. My grandpa, a religious man, was not pumped to die. Pretty much every human I know finds the prospect of dying unpleasant. Even if a dying person claims to believe in heaven, and claims to believe they’re going there, this belief does not seem connected to their facial muscles, vocal cords, or cardiovascular system in any discernible way. Proximity to death does not look like proximity to Disneyland. It doesn’t even look like proximity to Denny’s.

2. Hell

A lot of religious devotees claim that adherents of rival faiths, and/or atheists, are going to be subjected to barbaric torture for not merely a few hours, or a few years, but for all eternity. Some religious devotees have children who abandon their faiths or convert to a rival religion. And these devotees ostensibly believe that their precious children are going to be tortured for more than a trillion years.

If anyone truly believes this shit—like deep down in the lowest levels of their cerebrum, alongside beliefs like “I have two hands”—then consider me fucking Santa Claus. If I thought my daughter was going to be tortured for like a minute, let alone a year, let alone a decade, let alone a trillion decades, I would be having a panic attack and doing nothing else—not sleeping, not eating—until I stopped that from happening.

Yet I don’t see anything like this behavior in religious believers. They seem rather blasé about the fact that their precious babies are going somewhere over a trillion times worse than Guantanamo Bay, and that billions of people are continually getting sent to the same place—an endless orgy of sadism that would make Mengele weep—by a being of infinite love and wisdom, for the crime of failing to find a set of supernatural claims persuasive.

3. Climate doomerism

I know a lot of people who claim that climate change will soon lead to human extinction or widespread chaos and death. And yet, they do not act like they hold this belief. They seem perfectly calm when I interact with them. They don’t have the look of fear that would be on my face if I truly believed that my life was in danger. The mere fact that they are hanging out with me at all, rather than cashing out their 401(k)s and figuring out how to get themselves and their loved ones to Siberia, suggests that they do not truly believe in climate doomerism.

4. AI doomerism

Consider the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, who said that “AI will probably kill us all” in a panel discussion in 2015. Hmmm. Imagine driving your family around in a car that you think will “probably explode.” Now imagine driving that car around for over ten years. If you struggle to comprehend how anyone could behave this way, then you will understand why Altman does not believe what he says he believes.

5. Conspiracy theories

Consider the 9/11 “truther” conspiracy theory—that 9/11 was an inside job. Now consider the people who fancy themselves to be the brave whistleblowers on this conspiracy. Do they behave like whistleblowers? Do you see them fleeing the country? Are they the slightest bit nervous to blow the whistle in public or post rants about it on social media using their real names? As the journalist Jonathan Kay noted (cited in Not Born Yesterday):

“One of the great ironies of the Truth movement is that its activists typically hold their meetings in large, unsecured locations such as college auditoriums—even as they insist that government agents will stop at nothing to protect their conspiracy for world domination from discovery.”

6. “Education gives us skills to thrive in the modern economy”

This is known as the “human capital” theory of education, the idea that we go to high school and college to acquire human capital (i.e., valuable skills and knowledge)—to make us more productive citizens. This is in contrast to the more cynical “signaling theory” of education, which says that high school and college are status games in which you jump through arbitrary hoops to show off your superior intellect, rule-following ability, and work ethic, for the purpose of gaining entry into elite professions and social networks.

Economists and social scientists generally prefer the human capital theory to the icky signaling theory. The mass public seems to prefer it as well, which explains why they mostly support public funding of secondary and higher education (if they thought these things were giant pissing contests for the upper class, they presumably wouldn’t want to subsidize them). People seem to believe in the power of education to make students more productive citizens. But I don’t think people actually believe this: they only pseudobelieve this.

Let’s start with the students. They might claim to be going to college to download precious skills and knowledge onto their brains, but their behavior tells a different story. Here’s an example, from the economist Bryan Caplan, that suggests they only pseudobelieve they’re there for such a purpose:

Teachers have a foolproof way to make their students cheer: cancel class. If human capital purists are right, such jubilation is bizarre. Since you go to school to acquire job skills, a teacher who cancels class rips you off. You learn less, you’re less employable, yet your school doesn’t refund a dime of tuition. In construction, contractors don’t jump for joy if their roofers skip shingling to go gambling. In school, however, students jump for joy if their teachers cancel class to attend a conference in Vegas.

Caplan has a bunch of other delicious examples like this, but here’s my favorite one:

Fact: anyone can study at Princeton for free. While tuition is over $68,000 a year, anyone can show up and start attending classes. No one will stop you. No one will challenge you. Gorge yourself at Princeton’s all-you-can-eat buffet of the mind. Colleges do not card. The fact that almost no one grabs a free elite education shows human capital purism is false. Universities don’t card because they don’t need to. Unofficial education is vanishingly rare because it sends employers an invisible signal—also known as no signal at all.

7. “The rich don’t pay their fair share”

This is a popular slogan on the left, and many rich leftists echo it, which is odd, because they could easily make a voluntary donation to the government. Imagine if you went out to dinner with me, and the bill arrives, and I say, “My wife and I did not pay our fair share of the meal.” Then you ask me if I’d like to put in some cash or a credit card and I say, “No, we will not. You will have to make us pay by force.”

8. The big lie

This is the claim that the 2020 U.S. election was stolen from Trump in favor of Biden, which apparently 70% of Republicans “believed” at the time. But did they believe it? I don’t think so, and neither does the philosopher Michael Huemer:

According to Trump, the greatest crime in election history happened on his watch, and he knew about it 6 months in advance. How did he find out about it? What secret information did he have? Who was involved? And how could he let this happen??

No one seems the least bit interested in any of those questions… If this utter travesty happened on Trump’s watch, why has no one blamed him for it, not even his primary opponents? And why did Republicans overwhelmingly choose him to be their nominee again, “knowing” that the last time, Trump just let Joe Biden steal his job out from under him? Did it never occur to any of these people that Trump should have stopped the election fraud?

And finally, what would be the point of voting for Trump again? Since no one has done anything to prevent another election theft, why won’t he just have the next election stolen from him too?

9. Political beliefs in general

Imagine you discover a bias within yourself. You learn that you are biased about someone you love deeply—like a spouse, a child, or a close family member. Here’s how the bias works: whenever your loved one is suffering, you’re biased to dismiss it, blame them for it, and callously ignore their cries for help.

I know that if I was informed of such a bias, and actually believed it was inside of my brain, I would PANIC. “Oh my god! How long have I had this? Has my loved one been suffering this whole time? How do I get rid of this thing? How could they ever forgive me? Doctor, give me some meds, give me something—HELP ME!”

And yet, when people are told that their most deeply held political convictions are biased, just as powerfully as the beliefs of their wildly delusional and despicable political opponents, they just kind of… shrug their shoulders. They do not seem emotionally troubled by the decades of well-replicated studies on partisan motivated reasoning. They don’t even seem intellectually troubled. Do diehard partisans betray even the slightest hint of a desire to get rid of their bias? No, and I think I know why: their ideologies are mostly pseudobeliefs.

True pseudobeliefs

Now I don’t want to give the impression that all pseudobeliefs are false. Many of them are true. For example, most educated people say that humans evolved from apes and that our bodies and nervous systems were shaped by natural selection. These propositions are true, and most educated people believe that they believe them. But I don’t think they actually believe them. They are true pseudobeliefs.

For example, if people actually believed that humans were products of the Darwinian process, it would be blindingly obvious to them why men like Leonardo DiCaprio prefer sleeping with younger women. The explanation does not require any convoluted ideas about patriarchy (like, how exactly is it in men’s interests to curse themselves with a body that ages and attractions that never change?). If people truly believed that humans were products of evolution—like, truly believed it, deep down—they would immediately observe the data of male sexual attraction and make an inference to the best explanation: we are not descended from men who preferred to mate with post-menopausal women. But then what kind of men are we descended from? Well, men like Leonardo DiCaprio.

But this rather obvious Darwinian explanation rarely occurs to people, because most people’s belief in human evolution is a pseudobelief. It is merely something they say they believe to signal they are pro-science and not a Christian fundamentalist. I think of evolutionary psychology as the attempt to truly believe, rather than pseudobelieve, that humans are evolved organisms.

Pseudopersuasive pseudoarguments

Remember those “pseudoarguments” we met earlier? Where people pretend to be trying to persuade each other but are actually engaged in a primate dominance contest? We can now take a look at those annoying things with fresh eyes. When we’re in the middle of a pseudoargument, we’re not trying to change the person’s real beliefs and real values. Instead, we’re trying to change their pseudobeliefs and pseudovalues. We’re trying to convince them that only bad, uncool people believe what they believe, and only smart, cool people believe what we believe. We’re trying to give them social incentives to voice their agreement with us, or at least not publicly challenge us.

This is a clever strategy. Because if you’re trying to gain power, you don’t need to actually change hearts and minds. If people pseudobelieve your ideology and pseudovalue your values, out of fear or social pressure, then you’ve won, in the same way Hunter won when people pretended to buy his made-up story. You still get power—and you still get sworn in—even if everyone was totally bullshitting themselves and each other the whole time.

So when political activists choose between targeting real beliefs vs. pseudobeliefs, it’s not surprising that they focus on the latter (just take a glance at political discourse if you don’t believe me). And given the minuscule effect of a single vote on any political outcome, it’s not surprising that voters’ beliefs about the nation are largely of the pseudo variety. Why take the time to form true beliefs about public policy if you can’t meaningfully change it?

True believers

The most common example of a “true believer” is the Jihadist who blows himself up because he thinks that if he dies a martyr he will go to paradise, where he will be ravished by 72 (not coincidentally reproductive-age) virgins. And maybe suicide bombers really are true believers. Who knows? But I want to argue that they need not be. It is at least possible that beliefs in martyrdom and paradise are pseudobeliefs, albeit very important ones.

Remember: pseudovalues keep status games stable, so any religious value is likely to reflect an underlying status motive. The same logic applies to sacred myths and sacred deities, like the elaborate practices of the Ashanti religion. Suicide bombers might not be dying for their true beliefs. They might be dying for awe-inspiring status in the eyes of their pious peers—the culmination of an ever-escalating status competition to be seen as a bigger true believer than everyone else. If a person’s status prospects are low, and if their family’s status is deeply intertwined with their own status (which is generally true in fundamentalist cultures), then dying for awe-inspiring status can be—from a Darwinian perspective—a rational calculation.

Thinking about pseudobeliefs alerts us to the possibility that even apparently “true believers” may not be true believers. It may be that the appearance of being a true believer, or the appearance of being literally holier than thou, is what the “true believer” is really seeking.

Maybe I’m not even trying to change your true beliefs by writing this post. Maybe I’m merely trying to change your pseudobeliefs—to make you look smart and edgy for thinking like me, even if you don’t actually think like me. Given how stubborn and hard-to-convince humans are, it may be that changing the reader’s pseudobeliefs is the best a writer can hope for. It’s probably easier to convince you that it’s smart and edgy to believe X than to convince you that X is true. This is probably what most discourse is about anyways—how cool it is to endorse various slogans and talking points.

Changing true beliefs is hard. I’ve been trying to truly believe that humans are evolved organisms for over a decade now, and while I’ve made good progress, I haven’t fully succeeded. I can still sense a small part of myself that doubts that my most powerful feelings are products of natural selection—that I am an ape—or, rather, the brain of an ape. Maybe in another decade, I’ll have convinced the remaining part of my ape brain. Or maybe not. True belief is hard. Sometimes, the best we can hope for is a pseudobelief.