Who They Are
We are all less rational than we'd like.
In June of 1995, Hugh Grant was on top of the world. He had shot to stardom with the release of the movie, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and had a long-term relationship with one of the world’s most desired women. Grant was in Hollywood to promote a new film when he decided to cruise down Sunset Strip, where he met a sex worker who called herself Divine Brown and paid her $60 for oral sex in his car. Grant was arrested, convicted of public lewdness, and paid a fine. Shortly thereafter, he appeared on The Tonight Show to begin trying to rehabilitate his image.
Jay Leno opened the interview with Grant by asking one of the most famous questions in talk-show history: “What the hell were you thinking?”
Traditional economic theory insists that we humans are rational actors making rational decisions amidst uncertainty in order to maximize our marginal utility. Hugh Grant’s adventure with Divine shows that things are a good bit more complicated than that, an issue I’ll explore in this week’s TBL.
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Who They Are
During the heyday of internet atheism, I enjoyed the odd debate about the existence of God. As one does. Rationality received a sort of veneration from most of my adversaries. They had it and we believers did not. Rather, we were stupid, irrational, or evil. Perhaps all three.
Here’s one of them.
“I must admit, I don’t have much empathy for people who struggle with irrational beliefs. I’ve of course had mistaken beliefs and I’ve had lazily constructed beliefs, but I’ve never had an irrational belief. Not one.”
I’ll give you a minute to laugh at the absurdity of the claim. Homo economicus is a myth. We all do stupid, irrational things sometimes. Sometimes we do evil.
We all think we’re reasonable, and we often are, but we all have “reasonabilist” tendencies, too, left, right, and center.
We like to think we are like judges, carefully weighing the available evidence to adduce the best possible approximation of reality. Truth is, we’re much more like lawyers, scrounging for any plausible basis to confirm our priors.
Today, 15 years past that ridiculous claim of utter rationality, almost nobody contests the idea that we’re all irrational sometimes.
SPOILER ALERT: We’re all human.
As Mark Twain is famous for perhaps saying, “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” And we all know stuff for sure that just ain’t so.
In today’s highly polarized environment, partisans on each side readily see the other side’s failings but are oblivious to their own. It’s classic bias blindness.
And when our deeply held values and desires are in play, we are exceedingly protective of them. They aren’t merely viewpoints or opinions, they are convictions. Accordingly, when false information is central to our sense of self and self-worth, it becomes almost impossible to correct.
“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.”
So proclaimed the celebrated Stanford psychologist Leon Festinger, in a passage that sounds up-to-the-minute relevant yet was written in 1956, the year I was born. Nobody thinks they have joined a cult, as both research and real-world experience demonstrate.
For most of the past decade, Denialism (the denial of reality) has been largely the province of the political right. The most prominent examples relate to Donald Trump, most especially the claim that he really won the 2020 election. Such examples are often prominently displayed to support the idea that we are experiencing a crisis of truth – that we are in a post-truth age. As Richard Feynman famously put it: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
It’s a powerful argument.
Unfortunately, nearly all of those making that argument seem to think that it is exclusively a right-wing phenomenon and a Republican problem. Today, however, the most glaring examples are on the political left.
The Doobie Brothers got it exactly right.
“...what a fool believes he sees No wise man has the power to reason away....”
To be sure, the left has always provided glaring instances of irrationality. Rolling Stone’s specious report of a gang rape at the University of Virginia provides one obvious example.
A personal example involves NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen. He posted a powerful thread about how bias impacts Fox News, especially as it related to the Dominion Voting Systems case. It was excellent. In my first-ever interaction with him, I lauded the excellence of the thread and suggested he perform the same analysis on The New York Times (as its various newsroom debates made clear, and as more recent events have made indisputable, the differences between the entities are much more of degree than kind). Rosen didn’t respond and blocked me.
However, nothing prepared me for the past few weeks.
Students, academics, actors, artists, the Democratic Socialists of America, and many more, minimized, justified, or denied the reality of the atrocities inflicted by Hamas on October 7.1 Towns and schools have flown the Palestinian flag. Antisemitism is on the rise (not only on the left). Violent (“mostly peaceful”) protests are becoming commonplace, yet are largely ignored by the mainstream press, which hasn’t covered itself in glory.
Then, there’s this.
These posts went viral on TikTok (aided by the social media platform’s Chinese controllers, I’d guess), garnering thousands of likes and views before TikTok took them down.
The poor folks seen above read a rant of pure propaganda2 by Osama bin Laden and found themselves agreeing with everything he said, especially in light of October 7. Instead of considering that they might have lost the plot somehow, they immediately declared an existential crisis and decided to rethink their priors about bin Laden. Think about this. As they see it, rapists, torturers and mass murderers of civilians, including women, children, and the elderly, are deemed heroes of resistance and Osama Bin Laden is a profound and wrongly maligned truth-teller.
The vile wrongness of those ideas was inconceivable to me before recent events brought them to light. It’s shocking.
If you are “oppressed,” all is permitted. Thus, terrorism is commendable “resistance” of the “occupier.”
“What people ‘believe’…doesn’t reflect what they know,” as Yale’s Dan Kahan has explained. “It expresses who they are.” And they devoutly wish to be revolutionaries who change the world. That’s a fine goal, of course, but I badly wish they were more discerning about it.
Who they are is disgusting. If you can’t or won’t see that, I don’t know what else to say.
Totally Worth It
This video from Mumford & Sons has over 236 million views as I write this – astonishing!
A year ago, a YouTube commenter allows, “I put this here in hope that after weeks, months, years, whenever someone likes it and I will be reminded of this song.” The comment has been liked over 8,000 times.
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More Dave Ramsey (the subject of the previous TBL) reaction here, here, and here.
This is the best thing I read (and saw) in the last week. This is also fantastic and will be a classic. The funniest (unless it was this or this). The weirdest. The most important. The most remarkable. The most surprising. The most heinous. The most absurd. The best game. The best mystery. Not crazy. The best social media strategy. Factcheck: True. RIP, Peter Seidler.
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Loss aversion illustrated: When the Indiana Hoosiers finished their undefeated 1976 season by winning the NCAA championship, Coach Bob Knight walked out of the Philadelphia Spectrum with a friend. The friend said, “You did it, you did it, you won the championship!” Knight responded, “Shoulda been two.” He was still upset that his 1975 team had finished 31-1, losing in the region final to Kentucky.
The TBL Spotify playlist, made up of the songs featured here, now includes over 260 songs and about 19 hours of great music. I urge you to listen in, sing along, and turn up the volume.
My ongoing thread/music and meaning project: #SongsThatMove
Benediction
George Strait offers this week’s benediction.
We are all broken in some way or another and wildly prone to screw things up. W. H. Auden got it right.
O stand, stand at the window | As the tears scald and start; | You shall love your crooked neighbour | With your crooked heart.
We live on “a hurtling planet,” the poet Rod Jellema informed us, “swung from a thread of light and saved by nothing but grace.”
The blessing is the most famous of them all, from Numbers 6:24-26.
The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.
To those of us prone to wander, to those who are broken, to those who flee and fight in fear – which is every last lost one of us – there is a faith that offers grace and hope. And may love have the last word. Now and forever. Amen.
As always, thanks for reading.
Issue 158 (November 17, 2023)
There can be reasonable disagreements about how Israel prosecutes its war with Hamas. Of course. But there can be no plausible equivocation about the evils Hamas has perpetrated.
It is interspersed with antisemitic tropes and hate speech. He repeatedly wrote that America was dominated by Jews who “control your policies, media and economy.” All he wanted was Sharia law and for the U.S. to become an Islamic nation.