Why True Believers Pick The Political Religions They Do
Political religions are sets of rules that claim to define fair vs. unfair laws and policies. What is there about a true believer that causes him/her to pick this political religion over that one?
By David Grace (DavidGraceAuthor.com)
I recently wrote a column about religions (A Religion Is Any Set Of Rules That Claims To Define Moral Vs. Immoral Human Actions) and it made me think about why a True Believer picks this or that particular religion.
The foundation of most religions is a set of rules that the religion claims will define the conduct of a fair and moral person, the shape of a fair society, the structure of a fair system of government, or the organization of a fair economy.
Of course these are all subjective definitions of “fair” so what is fair to a communist is unfair to an anarchist, and vice versa.
In the end, these so-called rules of fairness are all just subjective feelings and prejudices and they all boil down to little more than a bunch of people shouting “Is so!” “Is not!”.
A Religion’s Basic Rules Are Simple But People Are Complicated
Religion’s rules are simple and limited. Human beings are complicated and varied.
There is a normal curve of human reaction to a specific rule or policy and that curve is wide. If you’re talking about two hundred million adults, millions and millions of them will populate the left and right edges of the normal curve with dozens if not hundreds of different reactions to the same rule or policy.
Any religion that says, “When this policy is the law, this is what people will do” is guaranteed to fail because in the real world millions of people will not act as the religion’s simplistic rules predict.
The most that any religion can hope to accurately say is: “When this is the rule, this is what many people will do.”
If you’re running a government or structuring an economy, having only fifty or sixty or seventy percent of real-world humans acting the way your religion’s rules need them to act will result in a failed society.
If twenty or thirty or forty percent of the population acts differently than predicted by the rules your religion has imposed on the government or the economy, your system is going to crash and burn. For proof of that look at any communist economy.
But the true believer doesn’t care if his theoretical ideas of fairness actually make the real world a better or a worse place. A perfect theory is always more important to the true believer than a failed reality.
If you disagree, ask yourself if dedicated communists were ever willing to admit that the rules of their religion didn’t work in the real world.
True Believers Need An Excuse To Justify Their Religion’s Rules
Communists justify redistributing wealth with the excuse/lie that all rich people stole their money and therefore they don’t deserve to keep it.
Libertarians justify their dog-eat-dog societal model with the fantasy/lie that almost everyone has an equal chance of success and therefore one person’s success is solely due to his hard work and intelligence while another person’s failure is solely due to his own mistakes, stupidity and laziness.
Neither of those claims are materially true in the real world.
Life is more complicated and more analog than that, but the true believer is not interested in the real-world effects of his theories. He’s interested in the “fairness” of the set of theoretical rules that justify his favored position in the world or which he thinks will get him a favored position in a world that’s organized according to his religion’s catechism.
Does Our Definition Of “Fair” Come From Nature Or Nurture?
If you deal with children a lot you often hear the complaint, “That’s not fair.” Certainly, kids form their own intuitive ideas about what is fair and what is unfair.
I think it would be a useful psychological experiment to present a variety of ethical scenarios to four-year-olds and ask each child which situations they think are fair and which they think are unfair. The next question would be “Why?”
Why does Jane think it’s fair that if Bill wins a cookie Sally automatically gets one too?
Why does Mark think it unfair that if Bill wins a cookie Sally automatically gets one too?
If after Bill rolls the dice, gets a five, and gets five cookies, does Sally think it’s fair that he can keep all five cookies? Or, is it fair that his five cookies should be distributed in some way between Bill and the other two children at the table, Mark and Jane? Or maybe between Bill and all the children in the room.
And, if so, what does Sally think is the fair way to divide five cookies among three people?
What would we find if we posed these sorts of questions to ten-thousand young children? Would we be able to link their varying answers back to some objective conditions of gender, family, intelligence or some other factors?
Fairness Vs. Right & Wrong
Sometimes theories of fairness and morality deal with different things and sometimes the concepts of fairness and morality overlap.
If Mark steals Jane’s cookie, that’s arguably both unfair and also immoral/wrong.
Sometimes something is wrong but not unfair.
If Bill tells Sally that he’ll give her a cookie if she tells him what her favorite toy is, she does, and then he doesn’t give her the cookie, is that both immoral and unfair?
In a sense Sally didn’t lose anything so maybe it’s not exactly unfair, but Bill broke his promise and got what he wanted without paying for it so Bill’s conduct is at least wrong/immoral.
What intuitive ideas do young children have about morality as well as about fairness, and can these differing ideas give us a clue about why some of them grow up to became true believers in communism and others in libertarianism — political religions that are based on diametrically opposed notions of fairness?
A True Believer Is Like Someone Who Becomes Infected With A Disease
Every day we’re exposed to all kinds of bacteria and viruses. Most of them have no effect. Sometimes we get a little rasp in our throats, we sneeze a couple of times and that’s pretty much it. Back to normal.
But occasionally, a bug hits us like a freight train and changes our lives forever. That’s kind of how I view exposure to a religion that turns an ordinary person into a True Believer. That, in turn, makes me wonder what is it about the “victim” that makes him/her a susceptible host for a particular ideology?
How We Were Raised
I’m sure that a family’s pre-existing moral/ethical values play a part in which political religion we choose, but isn’t it more than that?
We all get exposed to various religions as we grow up, but that doesn’t necessarily decide which one, if any, we fervently adopt.
Sometimes children of conservative parents grow up to become dedicated communists, but more often children of conservative parents cling to their parents’ values throughout their entire lives.
Why do some go one way and others go the opposite way?
Some True Believers Pick Their Religion Out Of Simple Self Interest
Of course, self-interest often plays a role in determining the religion a true believer adopts.
If I’m a male who’s been raised in a religion where men have all the power and women have no rights, it would be understandable that I would be a supporter of that religion. Not that I would necessarily, consciously, tote up all the benefits it gives me and logically decide to believe in it because I consciously figured out that it’s a good deal for me.
I think the process is often more subtle than that.
If I’ve grown up in a system that materially benefits me, then by default I would think that’s how the world ought to run. That system’s been terrific for me. Why would I question it?
If I’m a white person in Alabama in 1956, of course I’m going to like American Apartheid and think that’s exactly how things should work. Why would I question a system that so strongly benefits me?
In order to justify my beliefs, of course, I’ll parrot any number of phony reasons why white people deserve all those benefits and black people deserve all those detriments.
True Believers never have a problem finding phony-baloney arguments to justify the tenets of a religion that strongly benefits them.
Ego Is Another Factor In The Creation Of A True-Believer
If I’m a reasonably successful person, or more likely, a person energetically striving/hoping for success, I’m going to want to believe that any success I attain is due to my own efforts, talent and intelligence, that my success is proof of how great I am, and, by extension, how great the system I live under is.
Successful people love touting the survival-of-the-fittest system because they assume that because they’ve ended up on top they deserve to be on top and that those who are on the bottom are losers who deserve to be on the bottom.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. The rooster crows every morning and then the sun comes up, therefore the rooster’s call causes the sun to come up.
Of course, if I’m doing well I’m going to resent any ideology that might justify taking some of my wealth away from me or that claims that my success is at least partially the result of living under a system that is weighted in favor of people like me.
My ego is going to drive me to resist any claim that my success is not inherent proof of how terrific I am.
My ego is going to want me to believe that I’m successful because I’m great and, conversely, that people who aren’t as successful as I am have only themselves to blame.
That way my religion has not only proven that I’m great, it’s also proven that I’m so much better than those losers who I don’t want to have to care about. Yeah for me!
The desire to confirm your own greatness and confirm that you don’t have any inconvenient obligations to anyone else certainly drives some people to become true believers in the dog-eat-dog societal model.
The Role Of The True Believer’s Personality In Picking His Religion
Religions are based on the idea that their set of rules accurately defines fair and unfair human behavior.
This idea that all human activities, governments and economies can be run by only a few rules that seek to impose fairness is immensely appealing to the personality types who long for a world based on simplicity and certainty.
Some of those personality types are:
1.— Dogmatic people who see the world in terms of black and white. This is either good or bad. That is either right or wrong. These are people who neither see nor want to see any shades of gray.
- Dogmatic personalities are desperate to latch onto a belief system that only requires them to understand and follow clear, simple rules in order to chart their, and everyone else’s, course through life.
2. —People who don’t want to think love simple rules. If every question in life can be answered by just running your finger down the list of rules in your religion’s catechism then you never have to think at all.
- What should I do?
- What does the catechism say?
- Oh, here it is, Rule 19.
- Wow, great. OK, moving on.
3. — People who hate ambiguity. People who want certainty in everything.
4. — People who feel important and worthwhile by making themselves part of something bigger than themselves. Followers who have found a leader are enthusiastic true believers. For examples, look at the members of any cult.
5. — People who have what might be called the military mind set — a person who always wants to be have clear orders that don’t require any thought, evaluation, or understanding.
- “What did the Prophet/Leader say?”
- “Shove the next batch into the showers and turn on the gas.”
- “Yes, Sir!”
6. — People for whom human actions are often a mystery. The guy who often said the wrong thing and then was puzzled or frustrated when other people didn’t react the way he expected them to.
- This sort of person thinks that the human brain is like a computer that is hard-wired with specific routines that are triggered by various events and situations. He thinks that when input event X happens that everyone except those who are mentally ill or very stupid will all run the identical sub-program in their brains and generate the same identical response as predicted by his religion’s rules.
- When anyone doesn’t respond to this input the same way that the True Believer thinks they should, the True Believer labels that person as flawed, defective, or stupid and dismisses them as a loser whose well-being need not be considered.
While true believers come in all genders, backgrounds and occupations, my gut feeling is that the description of the stereotypical, median, true-believer in the dog-eat-dog society is a male, with a job in software or some other aspect of tech, between the ages of sixteen and forty, with lots of ideas and theories but very little common sense.
He thinks that the ability to apply all these theoretical rules to varying imagined situations proves he’s smart, but his inability to understand that real people in the real world often don’t act in accordance with his theories only proves that he’s only half as smart as he thinks he is.
All theory and no understanding is a recipe for failure.
He’s desperately clinging to the fantasy that the rules of some political religion will automatically identify the worthwhile people versus the losers and that those rules will explain how the world should be operated, which happens to be in a way that would primarily benefit people just like himself.
I’m picturing someone like Sheldon Cooper but with half of Sheldon’s IQ and an AA degree in Network Design.
I’m sure those proponents of the dog-eat-dog society with PhDs in database structures or finance will write in to tell me how wrong I am.
–David Grace (DavidGraceAuthor.com)
