Why do People believe in Conspiracies?

What happens when one’s beliefs come in conflict with reality? Not a small conflict, like the shops closing earlier than expected, but a massive conflict, such as believing that a non-existent conspiracy is out to get you.

Both leftists and rightists have their pet conspiracies. I have conspiracy theories. Every now and then, a conspiracy theory turns out to be true, but usually they aren’t.

Here’s an interesting example of a non-political conspiracy theory: Obsessed Benedict Cumberbatch Fans Tried to Have Me Fired:

It started, as so many online flaps do, with a thoughtless tweet. A starstruck friend and I had bumped into the popular actor Benedict Cumberbatch and his pregnant wife, and I made a faintly ironic tweet about it. …

Then the replies started. “How do you know it was his wife?” “What’s his wife like?”

Then, “SHE’S NOT PREGNANT.“ …

Members of the self-named “Skeptics” (a group of exclusively female Cumberbatch fans who believe that his wife is, variously: a prostitute, a hired PR girlfriend, a blackmailer, a con artist, a domestic abuser, mentally ill, and apparently the most brilliant criminal mastermind of all time, and that the marriage, his wife’s pregnancy, and very existence of their child have all been faked in a wide-ranging international conspiracy orchestrated by a 30-something British opera director in an attempt to force a naïve and helpless movie star to pretend to be married to her) had discovered me, and they were not impressed.

These sorts of fans are probably either 14 years old or actually low-level mentally ill.

In a way, I suspect that mental illness is far more common than we generally acknowledge.

If we define mental illness in evolutionary terms as something that interferes with survival and reproduction, then it is relatively rare. For example, depression–one of the most common mental illnesses–doesn’t interfere with female fertility, and at least in some studies, neuroticism is positively associated with having more children.

By contrast, if we define mental illness as including any significant disconnect from reality, then large swaths of people may be ill. People who are convinced that movie stars’ wives are fake, for example, may be perfectly adept at getting pregnant, but they are still delusional.

Here is another conspiracy theory: The Fetid, Right-Wing Origins of “Learn to Code”:

Last Thursday, I received the news that the HuffPost Opinion section—where I’d been opining on a weekly basis for a few months—had been axed in its entirety. … Dozens of jobs were slashed at HuffPost that day, following a round of layoffs at Gannett Media; further jobs were about to be disappeared at BuzzFeed. …

Then the responses started rolling in—some sympathy from fellow journalists and readers, then an irritating gush of near-identical responses: “Learn to code.” “Maybe learn to code?” “BETTER LEARN TO CODE THEN.” …

On its own, telling a laid-off journalist to “learn to code” is a profoundly annoying bit of “advice,” a nugget of condescension and antipathy. … the timing and ubiquity of the same phrase made me immediately suspect a brigade attack. My suspicions were confirmed when conservative figures like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. joined the pile-on, revealing the ways in which right-wing hordes have harnessed social media to discredit and harass their opponents.

So the journalist does some deep sleuthing, discovers that people on 4Chan are talking about telling journalists they should learn to code, and decides that the entire thing is some coordinated troll attack for no other reason than trolls are gonna troll. Just like some movie stars inexplicably have fake girlfriends, so people on 4Chan inexplicably hate journalists.

Related: The Death of a Dreamer:

The day before the conference, Heinz had apparently been told he would be on for ten minutes rather than the three he’d been planning. To fill some of the time at the end, he decided to speak briefly about some of companies he’d partnered with who’d be using Cambrian Genomics technology. Welcoming one of these partners onstage, Gilad Gome of Petomics, he talked about the idea of changing the smell of faeces and gastric wind and using it as an alert that a person was unwell. “When your farts change from wintergreen to banana maybe that means you have an infection in your gut,” he said. He introduced Sweet Peach as a similar project. “The idea is to get rid of UTIs and yeast infections and change the smell of the vagina through probiotics,” he said. …

“These Startup Dudes Want to Make Women’s Private Parts Smell Like Ripe Fruit” ran the headline at Inc.com later that day. … Soon, the Huffington Post picked it up: “Two Science Startup Dudes Introduced a New Product Idea this Week: A Probiotic Supplement that Will Make Women’s Vaginas Smell Like Peaches.” Gawker called it a “waste of science” and said Sweet Peach “sounds like a C-list rom-com with a similarly retrograde view on the priorities of the contemporary human female.” Then, Inc.com weighed in again: “Its mission, apparently hatched by a couple of 11-year-old boys still in the ‘ew, girl cooties’ stage, is to make sure women’s vaginas smell ‘pleasant.’” Similarly negative stories began appearing in major news sources such as Salon, Buzzfeed, the Daily Mail and Business Insider.

Long story short, all of the negative publicity resulted in public ostracism in his real life; funding for his company dried up; the company crashed; and he committed suicide.

Shit like this is why so many people hate journalists at magazines like HuffPo.

HuffPo journalists apparently think it’s fine to lie about a guy’s company and drive him to suicide, but think it is very concerning that some assholes told them to “learn to code.” (That said, a bullying campaign targeted at a bunch of people who just lost their jobs might also push someone over the edge to suicide.)

Over in reality land, the learn-to-code meme is far bigger than 4Chan and stems from society’s generalized attempt to replace outsourced manufacturing and other blue-collar labor with white collar jobs like coding. Earning a degree in computer science is, however, outside both the cognitive and physical resources of most laid-off factory workers. Indeed, as the information revolution progresses and society grows more complex, it is not unreasonable to expect that many people will simply not be smart enough to keep up. These are the losers, and there is nothing to be done for them but eternal bread and circuses, welfare and soma.

They commit suicide a lot.

It’s tempting to claim that being so out of touch with mainstream culture that you believe the “learn to code” meme sprang up ex nihilo is part of why these journalists got fired, but it’s far more likely they were just the latest victims of the contraction of print media that’s been going on for two decades.

People believe many other things that defy logic. The QAnoners fall more into the non-functional loony category, but the also-fanciful Russia Conspiracy is widely believed by otherwise levelheaded and normal liberals. The usually not too insane NY Times just ran an article claiming that, “As soon as black women could afford to buy mink coats, white society and white women said fur was all wrong.” Whew. There’s a lot implied in that statement.

(While I can’t tell you what people in New York think of black women wearing fur, I can tell you that around here, the only concern is for the fur.)

And there are many conservatives who believe an equal number of silly things about vast conspiracies–be they run by the Jews or the Gays or whomever–but in general, conservative conspiracy theories don’t get as much attention from reasonable people. Conservative conspiracies are low-class.

Take, for example, the way Alex Jones was deplatformed for getting the Sandy Hook students and their families harassed. Infowars is considered low-class and disreputable. But The New York Times did the exact same thing to the Covington students and their families, resulting in harassment and death threats for them, yet the NY Times has not been deplatformed.

What makes a conspiracy low or high status, published in the NY Times or on Infowars, believed by people who are otherwise kind of crazy or otherwise fairly sane?

Centrists and moderates tend not to champion political conspiracies, probably because they basically like society the way it is. “There is great big conspiracy to make society a nice place!” is not an argument most people will bother with. People who are further toward the political extremes, however, are dissatisfied with much of the way society is run. These people need an explanation for why society is so awful.

“Satan” is the archetypal explanation. The Evil One leads people into evil, and thus there is sin in the world and we are fallen from our original state of utopian grace. Satan has the rhetorical advantage of generally not being associated with a real person, so people of even moderate persuasions can be convinced to rally against the abstraction of evil, but sometimes people get a bit too worked up and actual people are put in prison for witchcraft or devil worship. Our last serious witch-hunt was in the 1980s, when people became convinced that Satanists were operating an international daycare conspiracy to kidnap, rape, and torture people’s children.

Today’s Pizzagaters are disreputable, but the Satanic Daycare Conspiracy was pushed by completely respectable mainstream media outlets and supported by the actions of actual police, judges, prosecutors, etc. If you lived through the 80s, you’ve probably repressed your memory of this, but it was a totally real conspiracy that actually sent real people to prison.

Today’s atheists have had to invent less demonic adversaries. The far left believes that the world is run by a cabal of evil heterosexual patriarchal cis-gendered white male Christians. The alt-right believes the world is run by a cabal of scheming Jews. Both of these are conspiracy theories. (Moderates occasionally delve into non-political conspiracies, like the ones surrounding famous movie stars or vaccinations.)

These theories provide all-encompassing ways of understanding the world. People are inexplicably mean to you? It must be part of a conspiracy by “them” to “get” you. As people encounter new information, the ideology they already have shapes how they react, either incorporating it as corroborating evidence or discarding it as worthless propaganda put out by their enemies.

Unfortunately, this makes conspiracies difficult to disprove.

A conspiracy will be considered reputable and believed by otherwise sane and level-headed people if it comes from an already trusted source, like the New York Times or 60 Minutes. It is normal to trust a source you already trust. After all, humans, even intelligent ones, are incapable of knowing everything society needs to know to keep functioning. We therefore have systems of trust and verification set up–such as medical degrees–that let us know what other people know so we can draw on their knowledge. If a plumber says that my plumbing is busted, it is probably in my interest to believe them. So it goes all the way up society–so if trusted people on CNN or in the government think Trump colluded with the Russians, then a reasonable person concludes that Trump colluded with the Russians.

A conspiracy will be considered disreputable and will appeal more to mentally unstable people if it requires first rejecting an established, trusted source. It is easy to believe a false thing by accident if someone you trust states it first; it requires much more work to first justify why all of the trusted sources are saying an untrue thing. This is therefore much easier if you are already paranoid, and distrusting everyone around you is usually a bad idea. (But not always.)

Of course this does not tell us how a source becomes trusted in the first place, but it does suggest that a false idea, once spread by a trusted source, can become very pernicious. (Conversely, a true idea, spread by a false source, will struggle.) The dominance of Cultural Marxism in universities may simply be a side effect of leftist conspiracies being spread by people whom society (or universities) see as more trustworthy in the first place.

(I suppose the fact that I usually don’t believe in conspiracy theories and instead believe in the power of evolution–of species, ideas, cities, civilizations, the sexes, families, etc–to explain the world as it is, might be why I generally see myself as a moderate. However, this leaves me with the task of coming up with a conspiracy theory to explain why evolutionary theories are not more widely accepted. “Meta-conspiracy theorist” sounds about right.)

(My apologies if this post is disorganized; it’s late.)

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Invasive Memes

 

Smallpox virus

Do people eventually grow ideologically resistant to dangerous local memes, but remain susceptible to foreign memes, allowing them to spread like invasive species?

And if so, can we find some way to memetically vaccinate ourselves against deadly ideas?

***

Memetics is the study of how ideas (“memes”) spread and evolve, using evolutionary theory and epidemiology as models. A “viral meme” is one that spreads swiftly through society, “infecting” minds as it goes.

Of course, most memes are fairly innocent (e.g. fashion trends) or even beneficial (“wash your hands before eating to prevent disease transmission”), but some ideas, like communism, kill people.

Ideologies consist of a big set of related ideas rather than a single one, so let’s call them memeplexes.

Almost all ideological memeplexes (and religions) sound great on paper–they have to, because that’s how they spread–but they are much more variable in actual practice.

Any idea that causes its believers to suffer is unlikely to persist–at the very least, because its believers die off.

Over time, in places where people have been exposed to ideological memeplexes, their worst aspects become known and people may learn to avoid them; the memeplexes themselves can evolve to be less harmful.

Over in epidemiology, diseases humans have been exposed to for a long time become less virulent as humans become adapted to them. Chickenpox, for example, is a fairly mild disease that kills few people because the virus has been infecting people for as long as people have been around (the ancestral Varicella-Zoster virus evolved approximately 65 million years ago and has been infecting animals ever since). Rather than kill you, chickenpox prefers to enter your nerves and go dormant for decades, reemerging later as shingles, ready to infect new people.

By contrast, smallpox (Variola major and Variola minor) probably evolved from a rodent-infecting virus about 16,000 to 68,000 years ago. That’s a big range, but either way, it’s much more recent than chickenpox. Smallpox made its first major impact on the historical record around the third century BC, Egypt, and thereafter became a recurring plague in Africa and Eurasia. Note that unlike chickenpox, which is old enough to have spread throughout the world with humanity, smallpox emerged long after major population splits occurred–like part of the Asian clade splitting off and heading into the Americas.

By 1400, Europeans had developed some immunity to smallpox (due to those who didn’t have any immunity dying), but when Columbus landed in the New World, folks here had had never seen the disease before–and thus had no immunity. Diseases like smallpox and measles ripped through native communities, killing approximately 90% of the New World population.

If we extend this metaphor back to ideas–if people have been exposed to an ideology for a long time, they are more likely to have developed immunity to it or the ideology to have adapted to be relatively less harmful than it initially was. For example, the Protestant Reformation and subsequent Catholic counter-reformation triggered a series of European wars that killed 10 million people, but today Catholics and Protestants manage to live in the same countries without killing each other. New religions are much more likely to lead all of their followers in a mass suicide than old, established religions; countries that have just undergone a political revolution are much more likely to kill off large numbers of their citizens than ones that haven’t.

This is not to say that old ideas are perfect and never harmful–chickenpox still kills people and is not a fun disease–but that any bad aspects are likely to become more mild over time as people wise up to bad ideas, (certain caveats applying).

But this process only works for ideas that have been around for a long time. What about new ideas?

You can’t stop new ideas. Technology is always changing. The world is changing, and it requires new ideas to operate. When these new ideas arrive, even terrible ones can spread like wildfire because people have no memetic antibodies to resist them. New memes, in short, are like invasive memetic species.

In the late 1960s, 15 million people still caught smallpox every year. In 1980, it was declared officially eradicated–not one case had been seen since 1977, due to a massive, world-wide vaccination campaign.

Humans can acquire immunity to disease in two main ways. The slow way is everyone who isn’t immune dying; everyone left alive happens to have adaptations that let them not die, which they can pass on to their children. As with chickenpox, over generations, the disease becomes less severe because humans become successively more adapted to it.

The fast way is to catch a disease, produce antibodies that recognize and can fight it off, and thereafter enjoy immunity. This, of course, assumes that you survive the disease.

Vaccination works by teaching body’s immune system to recognize a disease without infecting it with a full-strength germ, using a weakened or harmless version of the germ, instead. Early on, weakened germs from actual smallpox scabs or lesions to inoculate people, a risky method since the germs often weren’t that weak. Later, people discovered that cowpox was similar enough to smallpox that its antibodies could also fight smallpox, but cowpox itself was too adapted to cattle hosts to seriously harm humans. (Today I believe the vaccine uses a different weakened virus, but the principle is the same.)

The good part about memes is that you do not actually have to inject a physical substance into your body in order to learn about them.

Ideologies are very difficult to evaluate in the abstract, because, as mentioned, they are all optimized to sound good on paper. It’s their actual effects we are interested in.

So if we want to learn whether an idea is good or not, it’s probably best not to learn about it by merely reading books written by its advocates. Talk to people in places where the ideas have already been tried and learn from their experiences. If those people tell you this ideology causes mass suffering and they hate it, drop it like a hot potato. If those people are practicing an “impure” version of the ideology, it’s probably an improvement over the original.

For example, “communism” as practiced in China today is quite different from “communism” as practiced there 50 years ago–so much so that the modern system really isn’t communism at all. There was never, to my knowledge, an official changeover from one system to another, just a gradual accretion of improvements. This speaks strongly against communism as an ideology, since no country has managed to be successful by moving toward ideological communist purity, only by moving away from it–though they may still find it useful to retain some of communism’s original ideas.

I think there is a similar dynamic occurring in many Islamic countries. Islam is a relatively old religion that has had time to adapt to local conditions in many different parts of the world. For example, in Morocco, where the climate is more favorable to raising pigs than in other parts of the Islamic world, the taboo against pigs isn’t as strongly observed. The burka is not an Islamic universal, but characteristic of central Asia (the similar niqab is from Yemen). Islamic head coverings vary by culture–such as this kurhars, traditionally worn by unmarried women in Ingushetia, north of the Caucuses, or this cap, popular in Xianjiang. Turkey has laws officially restricting burkas in some areas, and Syria discourages even hijabs. Women in Iran did not go heavily veiled prior to the Iranian Revolution. So the insistence on extensive veiling in many Islamic communities (like the territory conquered by ISIS) is not a continuation of old traditions, but the imposition of a new, idealized, version of Islam.

Purity is counter to practicality.

Of course, this approach is hampered by the fact that what works in one place, time, and community may not work in a different one. Tilling your fields one way works in Europe, and tilling them a different way works in Papua New Guinea. But extrapolating from what works is at least a good start.

 

 

Political Inconsistency?

Does anyone else feel like politics are disconcertingly inconsistent?

Perhaps that the whole thing has come unmoored?

I was anti-war back in the early 00s, when the Left was anti-war. I marched in protest against the Iraq War. “Hey hey, ho ho, this racist war has got to go,” we chanted.

There was a lot of talk back then about how the US spends too much on the military and is over-involved in military expeditions abroad.

Of course, I was not an expert in international affairs, nor America’s military needs abroad. I might have been wrong. So might most of the other leftists who held similar opinions in those days. But “America is spending too much on the military, which is harming both brown people abroad and also Americans, who die in wars and have to pay for them. We would be better off spending that money on things that actually benefit Americans, like highspeed rail lines, education, health care, or just leaving it in people’s pockets and letting them use it however they want,” was absolutely a mainstream leftist position.

Today, Trump says something like he wouldn’t want to die in a war for Montenegro, and the Left responds that it is very important that Americans be willing to die for Montenegro.

Let’s step back and be rational for a second: No one wants to die for a foreign country. I don’t want to die for Australia, for Russia, for India, Japan, Montenegro, or Chad, and no one from those countries wants to die for America. Certainly there is a logic of “strength in numbers,” in which we are all safer because we create a credible, united front, but there is also logic in avoiding”entangling alliances,” which were blamed for creating the death machine known as WWI.

The question of whether Americans should die in defense of Montenegro (something we have been committed to without ever being asked,) ultimately depends on whether alliance with Montenegro makes us more or less secure here at home–a matter I haven’t seen any discussion about on Left or Right.

The only relevant argument I’ve seen is that various alliance-members have died “for us” in “our” wars in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, therefore we should be equally willing to die for them in their wars. The logic seems to be, “The government sent you to die in a stupid, racist war that destroyed the American economy and was a terrible idea all around, therefore you’re morally obligated to go die in Montenegro, too.”

Perhaps we should be asking whether dying in Iraq and Afghanistan was a good idea for anyone, not just taking it as some kind of obscene sunk cost that obligates everyone else to go die in random conflicts from here on out.

It seems like all of the talk about how “the military is too big” and “bombing countries like Iraq and Afghanistan is racist” was dropped as soon as people realized that massively cutting the military budget would mean… scaling back military obligations abroad.

I find a Left that suddenly pro-military spending and antagonistic toward Russia awfully disconcerting.

There are a variety of issues on the Right that I find it difficult to believe people *truly* care that much about–for example, I don’t think anyone actually believed that national policy should be determined by whether or not Bill Clinton had sex with an intern. “Bill had sex” is really just an excuse to try to force him out on technical grounds because they already didn’t like him. Similarly on the Left, I don’t believe any of the outraged commentators actually care whether the US flag touched the North Korean flag at the US/NK summit–the Left has never cared about proper flag etiquette.

These issues are transparently not things politicians, commentators, or other elites actually care about.

Was “America spends too much on the military/fights too many wars abroad” similarly nothing but a dumb rallying cry for the Left, something the upper muckety-mucks never actually believed? And what happened to all of the people who were once quite opposed to US “imperialism”?

Anecdotal observations of India, Islam, and the West

Updated values chart!

People seemed to like this Twitter thread, so I thought I would go into some more detail, because trying to compress things into 140 characters means leaving out a lot of detail and nuance. First the original, then the discussion:

Back around 2000-2005, I hung out in some heavily Muslim forums. I learned a few things:
1. Muslims and Indians do not get along. At all. Hoo boy. There are a few people who try to rise above the fray, but there’s a lot of hate. (and yes there are historical reasons for this, people aren’t just random.)
2. I didn’t get to know that many Muslims very well, but among those that I did, the nicest were from Iran and Pakistan, the nastiest from Britain. (I wasn’t that impressed by the Saudis.)
3. Muslims and Westerners think differently about “responsibility” for sin. Very frequent, heated debate on the forum. Westerners put responsibility to not sin on the sinner. Hence we imprison [certain] criminals. Islam puts responsibility on people not to tempt others.
Most obvious example is bikinis vs burkas. Westerners expect men to control their impulse to have sex; Muslims expect women not to tempt men. To the Westerner it is obvious that men should display self control, while to the Muslim it is obvious that women should not tempt men. (Don’t display what you aren’t selling.)
Likewise w/ free speech vs. offense. Westerners expect people to control their feelings over things like Piss Christ or Mohammad cartoons. Islam blames people for offending/hurting other people’s feelings; the onus for non-offense is on the speaker, not the hearer.

Obviously this is simplified and exceptions exist, but it’s a pretty fundamental difference in how people approach social problems.

Detailed version:

Back in my early days upon the internet, I discovered that you can join forums and talk to people from all over the world. This was pretty exciting and interesting, and I ended up talking people from places like India, China, Israel, Pakistan, Iran, etc. It was here that I began really understanding that other countries have their own internal and external politics that often have nothing at all to do with the US or what the US thinks or wants.

1. The rivalry between India and Pakistan was one such surprise. Sure, if you’ve ever picked up a book on the recent history of India or Pakistan or even read the relevant Wikipedia pages, you probably know all of this, but as an American whose main exposure to sub-continental culture was samosas and music, the vitriolic hate between the two groups was completely unexpected.

Some background, from the Wikipedia:

Since the partition of India in 1947 and creation of modern States of India and Pakistan, the two South Asian countries have been involved in four wars, including one undeclared war, and many border skirmishes and military stand-offs.

The Kashmir issue has been the main cause, whether direct or indirect, of all major conflicts between the two countries with the exception of the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 where conflict originated due to turmoil in erstwhile East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). …

As the Hindu and Muslim populations were scattered unevenly in the whole country, the partition of British India into India and Pakistan in 1947 was not possible along religious lines. Nearly one third of the Muslim population of British India remained in India.^[3] Inter-communal violence between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims resulted in between 500,000 and 1 million casualties.^{[1] …}

Following Operation Searchlight and the 1971 Bangladesh atrocities, about 10 million Bengalis in East Pakistan took refuge in neighbouring India.^[22] India intervened in the ongoing Bangladesh liberation movement.^[23][24] After a large scale pre-emptive strike by Pakistan, full-scale hostilities between the two countries commenced. …

This war saw the highest number of casualties in any of the India-Pakistan conflicts, as well as the largest number of prisoners of war since the Second World War after the surrender of more than 90,000 Pakistani military and civilians.^[29] In the words of one Pakistani author, “Pakistan lost half its navy, a quarter of its air force and a third of its army”.^[30]

Please note that India and Pakistan both HAVE NUKES.

Some people are also still angry about the Muslim conquest of India:

Muslim conquests on the Indian subcontinent mainly took place from the 12th to the 16th centuries, though earlier Muslim conquests made limited inroads into modern Afghanistan and Pakistan as early as the time of the Rajput kingdoms in the 8th century. With the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, Islam spread across large parts of the subcontinent. In 1204, Bakhtiar Khilji led the Muslim conquest of Bengal, marking the eastern-most expansion of Islam at the time.

Prior to the rise of the Maratha Empire, which was followed by the conquest of India by the British East India Company, the Muslim Mughal Empire was able to annex or subjugate most of India’s kings. However, it was never able to conquer the kingdoms in upper reaches of the Himalayas such as the regions of today’s Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan; the extreme south of India, such as Travancore and Tamil Nadu; and in the east, such as the Ahom kingdom in Assam.

I don’t know if any disinterested person has ever totaled up the millions of deaths from invasions and counter-invasions, (you can start by reading Persecution of Hindus and Persecution of Buddhists on Wikipedia, or here on Sikhnet, though I can’t say if these are accurate articles,) but war is a nasty, violent thing that involves lots of people dying. My impression is that Islam has historically been more favorable to Judaism and Christianity than to Hinduism because Christians, Jews, and Muslims are all monotheists whose faiths descend from a common origin, whereas Hindus are pagans, which is just right out.

Anyway, I am not trying to give a complete and accurate history of the subcontinent, which is WAY TOO LONG for a paltry blog post. I am sure people on both sides could write very convincing and well-reasoned posts arguing that their side is the good and moral side and that the other side is the one that committed all of the atrocities.

I am just trying to give an impression of the conflict people are arguing about.

Oh, hey, did you know Gandhi was murdered by a Hindu nationalist in a conflict over Pakistan?

Gandhi’s vision of an independent India based on religious pluralism, however, was challenged in the early 1940s by a new Muslim nationalism which was demanding a separate Muslim homeland carved out of India.^[9] Eventually, in August 1947, Britain granted independence, but the British Indian Empire^[9] was partitioned into two dominions, a Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan.^[10] As many displaced Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs made their way to their new lands, religious violence broke out, especially in the Punjab and Bengal. Eschewing the official celebration of independence in Delhi, Gandhi visited the affected areas, attempting to provide solace. In the months following, he undertook several fasts unto death to promote religious harmony. The last of these, undertaken on 12 January 1948 when he was 78,^[11] also had the indirect goal of pressuring India to pay out some cash assets owed to Pakistan.^[11] Some Indians thought Gandhi was too accommodating.^[11][12] Among them was Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist, who assassinated Gandhi on 30 January 1948 by firing three bullets into his chest.^[12]

The American habit of seeing everything through the Cold War lens (we sided with Pakistan against India for Cold War Reasons) and reducing everything to narrow Us-Them dynamics is really problematic when dealing with countries/groups with a thousand or so years of history between them. (This is part of what makes the whole “POC” term so terrible. No, non-whites are not a single, homogenous mass unified entirely by white victimization.)

Obviously not all 1 billion or so Hindus and 1 billion or so Muslims in the world are at each other’s throats. Many save their rivalry for the annual India-Pakistan cricket game:

The India–Pakistan cricket rivalry is one of the most intense sports rivalries in the world.^[1][2] An India–Pakistan cricket match has been estimated to attract up to one billion viewers, according to TV ratings firms and various other reports.^[3][4][5] The 2011 World Cup semifinal between the two teams attracted around 988 million television viewers.^[6][7][8] Also tickets for the India-Pakistan match in the 2015 World Cup sold out just 12 minutes after they went on sale.

The arch-rival relations between the two nations, resulting from the extensive communal violence and conflict that marked the Partition of British India into India and Pakistan in 1947 and the subsequent Kashmir conflict, laid the foundations for the emergence of an intense sporting rivalry between the two nations who had erstwhile shared a common cricketing heritage. …

At the same time, India-Pakistan cricket matches have also offered opportunities for cricket diplomacy as a means to improve relations between the two countries by allowing heads of state to exchange visits and cricket followers from either country to travel to the other to watch the matches.

(Gotta love the phrase “erstwhile shared a common cricketing heritage.”)

And some Hindus and Muslims are totally chill and even like each other. After all, India and Pakistan are next door to each other and I’m sure there are tons of good business opportunities that enterprising folks would like to take advantage of.

But there’s a lot of anger.

BTW, there’s also a rivalry between India and China, with both sides accusing each other of massive educational cheating.

2. I should note that the people I talked to definitely weren’t a random distribution of Muslims from around the world. When I say “the Muslims” here, I really mean, “the particular Muslims I happened to talk to.” The folks you’re likely to meet on the internet are high class, educated, speak English, and come from areas with good internet connections. So this definitely isn’t a good way to learn what the Average Moe’ in most Muslim countries thinks.

Note: People in countries colonized by Britain (like India and Pakistan) tend to speak English because it’s taught as a second language in their schools, while people in Indonesia (the world’s biggest Muslim country) probably learn Dutch (they were colonized by the Dutch) and folks in Morocco learn French. The nicest Muslims I met were from Iran and Pakistan and the least pleasant were from Europe. (The Saudis were the kind of folks who would sweetly explain why you needed to die.)

Why? Aside from the vicissitudes of colonial languages and population size, Iran and Pakistan are both countries with plenty of culture, history, and highly-educated people. The Persian Empire was quite an historical force, and the ruins of some of the world’s oldest cities (from the Indus-Valley culture) are in Pakistan (the Indians would like me to note that many of these ruins are also in India and that Indians claim direct cultural descent from the IVC and Pakistanis do not.) Some of the Iranians I met were actually atheists, which is not such a great thing to be in Iran.

Pakistan, IMO, has been on a long, slow, decline from a country with a hopeful future to one with a much dimmer future. Smart, highly-educated Pakistanis are jumping ship in droves. I can’t blame them (I’d leave, too,) but this leaves behind a nation populated with the less-capable, less-educated, and less-pro-West. (Iran probably has less of a problem with brain-drain.)

Many of the other Muslim countries are smaller, don’t speak English, or more recently started down the path to mass literacy, and so don’t stand out particularly in my memories.

The absolute worst person lived in Britain. The only reason he was even allowed to stick around and wasn’t banned for being a total asshole was that one of the female posters had a crush on him and the rest of us played nice for her sake, a sentence I am greatly shamed to write. I’ve never met a Muslim from an actual Muslim country as rude as this guy, who posted endless vitriol about how much he hated Amerikkka for its racism against blacks, Muslims, and other POCs.

Theory: Muslims in predominantly Muslim countries have no particular reason to care what white males are up to in other countries, but Muslims in Britain do, and SJW ideology provides a political victimology framework for what would otherwise be seen as normal competition between people or the difficulties of living in a foreign culture.

3. Aside from the issue of white men, this was before the days of the Muslim-SJW alliance, so there were lots of vigorous, entertaining debates on subjects like abortion, women’s rights, homosexuality, blasphemy, etc. By “debate” I mean “people expressed a variety of views;” there was obviously no one, single viewpoint on either side, but there were definitely consistent patterns and particular views expressed most of the time.

Muslims tend to believe that people have obligations to their families and societies. I have read some lovely tributes to family members from Muslims. I have also been surprised to discover that people whom I regarded as very similar to myself still believed in arranged marriage, that unmarried adult children should live with their parents and grandparents to help them out, etc. These are often behavioral expectations that people don’t even think to mention because they are so common, but very different from our expectation that a child at the age of 18 will move out and begin supporting themselves, and that an adult child who moves in with their parents is essentially a “failure.”

The American notion of libertarianism, that the individual is not obligated at all to their family and society, or that society should not enforce certain behavior standards, but everyone should pursue their own individual self-interest, is highly alien throughout much of the world. (I don’t think it’s even that common in Europe.) Americans tend to see people as individuals, personally responsible for their own actions, whereas Muslims tend to think the state should enforce certain standards of behavior.

This leads to different thoughts about sin, or at least certain kinds of sin. For example, in the case of sexual assault/rape, Westerners generally believe that men are morally obligated to control their impulses toward women, no matter what those women are wearing. There are exceptions, but in general, women expect to walk around wearing bikinis in Western society without being randomly raped, and if you raped some random ladies on the beach just “because they were wearing bikinis,” you’d get in big trouble. We (sort of) acknowledge that men find women in bikinis attractive and that they might even want to have sex with them, but we still place the onus of controlling their behavior on the men.

By contrast, Muslims tend to place the onus for preventing rape on the women. Logically, if women are doing something they know arouses men, then they shouldn’t do it if they don’t don’t want the men to be aroused; don’t display what you aren’t selling. The responsibility isn’t on the men to control their behavior, but on the women to not attract male attention. This is why you will find more burkas than bikinis in Afghanistan, and virtually no burkas anywhere outside of the Muslim world.

If you don’t believe me, here are some articles:

Dutch Woman jailed in Qatar after Reporting Rape, Convicted of “Illicit Sex”

According to Brian Lokollo, a lawyer who was hired by the woman’s family, Laura was at a hotel bar having drinks with a friend in the Qatari capital, but then had a drink that made her feel “very unwell.”

She reportedly woke up in an unfamiliar location and realized “to her great horror” that she had been raped after her drink was spiked, Lokollo said.

When she reported the rape to the police, she herself was imprisoned. …

No mention was made of the rape accusation during proceedings. Neither defendant was present in court, in what was the third hearing in the case. …

At a court hearing in Doha Monday, the 22-year old, whom CNN has identified only as Laura, was handed a one-year suspended sentence and placed on probation for three years for the sex-related charge, and fined 3,000 Qatari Riyals ($823) for being drunk outside a licensed location.

British Woman Arrested in Dubai after Reporting Rape, Group Says:

A British tourist has been arrested in Dubai on charges of extramarital sex after telling police a group of British nationals raped her in the United Arab Emirates, according to a UK-based legal advice group called Detained in Dubai.

“This is tremendously disturbing,” Radha Stirling, the group’s founder and director, said in a statement. “Police regularly fail to differentiate between consensual intercourse and violent rape.

Stoning of Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow:

The stoning of Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow was a public execution carried out by the Al-Shabaab militant group on October 27, 2008 in the southern port town of Kismayo, Somalia. Initial reports stated that the victim, Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, was a 23-year-old woman found guilty of adultery. However, Duhulow’s father and aunt stated that she was 13 years old, under the age of marriage eligibility, and that she was arrested and stoned to death after trying to report that she had been raped. The execution took place in a public stadium attended by about 1,000 bystanders, several of whom attempted to intervene but were shot by the militants.^[1][2][3]

There’s a similar dynamic at work with Free Speech/religious freedom issues. The average Christian westerner certainly isn’t happy about things like Piss Christ or Jesus dildos, yet such things are allowed to exist, there is definitely a long history of legal precedent on the subject of heretical and morally offensive works of “art,” and last time I checked, no one got shot for smearing elephant dung on a picture of the Virgin Mary. The general legal standard in the West is that it doesn’t really matter if speech hurts your feelings, it’s still protected. (Here I would cite the essential dignity of the self in being allowed to express one’s true beliefs, whatever they are, and being allowed to act in accordance with one’s own moral beliefs.) I know there are some arguments about this, especially among SJWs, and some educe cases where particular speech isn’t allowed, but the 1st Amendment hasn’t been repealed yet.

By contrast, Muslims tend to see people as morally responsible for the crime of hurting other people’s feelings, offending them, or leading them away from the true faith (which I assume would result in those people suffering eternal torment in something like the Christian hell.) Yes, I have read very politely worded arguments for why apostates need to be executed for the good of society (because they make life worse for everyone else by making society less homogenous.) I’ve also known atheists who lived in Muslim countries who obviously did not think they should be executed.

Basically, Westerners think individuals should strive to be ethical and so make society ethical, while Muslims believe that society should enforce ethicality, top-down, on society. (Both groups, of course, punish people for crimes like theft.)

The idea of an SJW-Muslim alliance is absurd–the two groups deeply disagree on almost every single issue, except their short-term mutual interest in changing the power structure.

The Cathedral Reiterates Itself, Round-up #17

“Post-election Self-care with Food and Play [doh].”  I don’t know how someone posted this with a straight face.

This article was going to be about all of the college students weeping, coloring, and playing with play-doh in the wake of the election, but then I found Dean Faust basically reiterating the whole Cathedral ideology and decided that would be much more interesting.

After all, while the whole infantile thing is interesting in a train wreck kind of way, I extend students a certain leeway to be dumb. They’re barely out of highschool, enclosed in an ideological bubble, and just starting to get their bearings in this world. I, too, said (did, believed) a lot of dumb things at that stage, and I’m glad most of my friends and family just ignored it.

But I expect a lot more of fully-grown adults who’ve been out of college for many years and ought to know better.

Since the election, colleges from Harvard to Vanderbilt have publicly stated their intention to protect students who are living illegally in the US:

Cornell students hold “Cry-In” source

In one such letter, Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber said the university would protect its undocumented immigrant students “to the maximum extent that the law allows …. For example, we do not disclose private information about our students, faculty or staff to law enforcement officers unless we are presented with a subpoena or comparably binding requirement.” …

Reed President John R. Kroger wrote, “Reed will not assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the investigation of the immigration status of our students, staff or faculty absent a direct court order,” while Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth wrote that the institution “will not voluntarily assist in any efforts by the federal government to deport our students, faculty or staff solely because of their citizenship status.”

Similarly, Portland State University President Wim Wiewel wrote that the university “will not facilitate or consent to immigration enforcement activities on our campus unless legally compelled to do so or in the event of clear exigent circumstances such as an imminent risk to the health or safety of others” and that it “will not share confidential student information, such as immigration status, with the federal government unless required by court order.” …

At Vanderbilt University, the student government on Wednesday voted 26 to one, with one abstention, in favor of a resolution calling on the university to become a sanctuary campus. The day before, Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos had issued a letter addressing the sanctuary campus call.

“We do not have the option of refusing to follow the law, but I want to emphasize that we are not a law enforcement agency. [bold mine] We are a university,” Zeppos wrote. “We are served by Vanderbilt University Police Department, and no VUPD officer is permitted to undertake an inquiry into the citizenship or immigration status of our students or others on our campus. We do not routinely release to the public or to public officials any citizenship or immigration information that may be in our possession, unless compelled to do so by law.”

I don’t know which college this is from, but does it even matter?

I’d be more sympathetic to this position if these same universities weren’t simultaneously prosecuting criminal charges against accused students accused of rape. If universities aren’t law enforcement agencies, then young women who bring rape charges against their classmates should be politely told that they need to take the matter up with the police, not the university.

For that matter, my local HOA feels compelled to enforce city parking regulations even though they are not the police. People pick and chose the laws they want to enforce.

If a university knew one of their students had committed murder or mugged people, the university would recognize these as crimes and turn the student over to the police. But universities that know some of their students are living illegally in the US are publicly stating that they have no intention of reporting their crimes.

Meanwhile, President Faust of Harvard University has something to say:

Since we last met, the United States has chosen a new president. A number of the views articulated and policies proposed in the course of the campaign and the ensuing weeks pose significant challenges for Harvard and its most deeply held commitments.

Of course Faust does not consider the idea that some members of the Harvard community might agree with Trump, nor does she articulate what exactly Harvard’s commitments are, if not to the education and well-being of Americans?

At the same time, eruptions of frightening expressions of hatred, bias, and violence have targeted members of our own community as well as thousands more across the country.

Oh, like when a Somali “refugee” ran over people with his car and then went on a machete-chopping rampage against his classmates at Ohio State University? That kind of hatred and violence?

Which is not the first time a Somali went rogue with a machete, by the way:

But Monday’s incident is just the latest in a string of incidents in which some migrants in the community went rogue and unleashed violent attacks and even planned terrorist plots.

Back in Feburary, a Middle-Eastern restaurant in Columbus was the scene of a frightening machete attack that left four people wounded and the attacker killed.

Nazareth Restaurant and Deli owner Hani Baransi told Foxnews.com in May that he thought he and his establishment were targeted by a Muslim man with a Somali background because he was from Israel and adorned his establishment with the Jewish State’s flag.

Or are we talking about incidents like the Muslim woman who later admitted that she completely lied about being attacked by Trump supporters?

UPDATE, 10 November, 5.22pm — A Louisana college student admitted she made up reports of being attacked by two men, one she said was wearing a Donald Trump hat.

The Lafayette Police department say they are no longer investigating her claims. The University of Louisiana would not disclose whether they were taking disciplinary action against the student, citing federal law prohibition.

It’s bad enough when students lie, but small children who still use play-doh and coloring books can’t be expected to have fully developed moral compasses. Dean Faust, however, is presumably an adult, and should therefore feel some sense of shame at spreading deception.

I want to say a few words today about how the University is responding to these new realities and to reaffirm our essential values and responsibilities as an academic institution in these unsettling times. I have distributed two messages—on November 15 and 28 [both appear below]—designed to begin to address some of these questions. The most recent message considered the possibility of more aggressive enforcement of federal immigration laws and detailed the heightened support and protection we are offering students, faculty and staff. I urge you to read those communications if you have not already. As an early and fervent public supporter of the DREAM Act, I feel particular concern about our undocumented students and as an update to my letter last week, I want to report that I have been in contact over the past few days with legal advisors, with members of Congress and individuals in the Executive Branch on behalf of these vulnerable members of our community. Our support for them is strong and unequivocal.

At no point does Faust mention responsibilities or concerns for students who have, you know, bothered to actually follow the laws of their host country, or actual American students who might have gotten a place at Harvard had they not accepted illegal aliens instead.

Does Harvard feel any responsibility at all toward the country it is actually located in?

Faust continues:

Other measures and policies under discussion concern us as well. The resources provided for research through agencies like NIH [the National Institutes of Health] and NSF [the National Science Foundation] are critical to Harvard. Last year, we received $597 million in federal funding for research. We will be very focused on making the case for continuing and indeed increasing resources for research with those likely to influence policy in Washington.

Hey, Faust, maybe you should go begging for money to the countries your students are actually from, rather than the government whose laws you are openly flouting? Why should taxpayers in Kentucky send money to a school that will hand it over to citizens of a foreign nation?

Now, you might be thinking, hey, anyone who can get into Harvard is probably a smart person who can contribute to the US by curing cancer, inventing quantum computers, or something else worthwhile. This is probably true. These Harvard students are most likely upstanding folks who forgot to fill out all of their annoying immigration paperwork rather than devious criminals sneaking across the border to sell heroin.

These students, who have access to all of Harvard’s considerable clout and legal expertise, will in all likelihood get their paperwork sorted out and be allowed to stay. They are neither the primary targets of Americans’ ire against illegal immigrants nor likely suffer greatly as a result. (And if they aren’t allowed to stay, they will still likely succeed back in their home countries, because these are extremely bright, motivated, hard-working people.)

But back to Faust:

We are committed to attracting the most talented students and faculty from across the world. This means that immigration policies have a direct effect on our fundamental purposes, and we will work to ensure that Harvard remains an attractive—and available—destination for scholars near and far.

As additional policy proposals emerge relevant to Harvard’s research and teaching mission, we will be engaged in representing the interests of the University and the members of its community.

Note “from across the world,” not “from the US.” Harvard’s “fundamental purposes” have nothing to do, in Faust’s equation, with making Harvard attractive and available to Americans, the same people whose tax dollars she wants to support the university! Harvard is a global institution with global interests, but it only seems to want money from American taxpayers.

An early twentieth-century civil rights activist named Nannie Helen Burroughs once remarked that education is “democracy’s life insurance.” … I would like us to think in these times about our responsibilities as a university to serve democracy by striving to be a kind of life insurance. There is of course the sense that I think Burroughs meant—by educating students with critical minds, discerning judgment, broad understanding, and respect for their fellow citizens and for the rule of law.

But our responsibility is not just for the students we send into the world.

Ah, but Dean Faust, you must realize that “the world” is not a democracy. It is not even a country. It is many countries, some democracies, others not. Your students cannot support a system that does not exist in the place they are going.

I would say that Faust is simply confused–she does not realize that there is a difference between “America” and “the world”–except that I do not believe this at all. I think Dean Faust is being completely honest with us: Harvard’s purpose is not to educate Americans or support America, but to look out for Harvard, to grow Harvard’s brand by attracting future global elites and use them to spread Harvard’s ideology to the rest of the globe.

Veritas is our motto, yet we find ourselves in a time where truth and facts seem hardly to matter. We must uphold and make the case for the commitment to reason, truth and the power of knowledge. We must be unwavering in the rigor with which we pursue new insights and test our hypotheses, and we must be open to the kind of debate, difference and variety of viewpoints that can change and strengthen ideas.

Trump supporter beaten by protestors–is the kind of escalating violence Faust is worried about?

To create a community in which individuals dare to debate and disagree we must also build an environment of belonging and mutual respect. As a time when we read about—indeed witness—escalating incidents of hatred and violence—ethnic, religious, racial and political—we need to insist on a different way of being together.

 

Faust shows no awareness of or sensitivities to the problems of people who aren’t privileged members of one of the world’s most elite universities. No awareness of rising death rates for white Americans, declining wages, or the ravages of the heroin epidemic. She knows nothing about communities ravaged by crime or American workers laid off en mass in favor of foreign replacements.

More now than ever, we must advance our aspiration to be a place where every member of our community, regardless of race, gender, disability, religion, or sexual orientation, can thrive by having the full opportunity to engage in all that Harvard offers.

(But not belief or ideology. Certainly Harvard should not be a safe place for the 50% of the country that supports Trump.)

Concert-goers “enriched” by Harvard’s ideology

These efforts take on a deeper significance for those members of our community who have been specially burdened by the troubling rhetoric and events of recent months—Muslims, immigrants, ethnic minorities among them. We must live our values and demonstrate what it means to be a community enriched not embattled by difference and diversity.

When I visited South Africa in 2009, I was struck by how everyone I met in that fledgling democracy felt a kind of urgency about the nation’s future trajectory as well as a sense that what each individual did had direct implications not just for its success but for its very survival. Nothing seemed assured. In contrast, I thought to myself, we Americans seemed to take our government and political order for granted. This is a time of profound change in America, a time when we are called on to abandon such complacency. I have enormous faith in all of you and in Harvard as an institution to rise to that challenge.

Clearly there are many valuable lessons we can learn from South Africa, a nation where students literally set their universities on fire and government leaders sing about genocide:

Then again, maybe that is the idea.

Quick thoughts on the “replication crisis” and calls to make the field more mathematically rigorous

If you aren’t familiar with the “replication crisis,” in social psychology, start here, here, and here.

I consider the courses I took in college on quantitative and qualitative methods the most important of my undergraduate years. I learned thereby a great many important things about how not to conduct an experiment and how to think about experimental methodology (not to mention statistics.)

If I were putting together a list of “general education” requirements I wanted all students to to take in order to declare them well-educated and ready to go out into the world, it’d be a course on Quantitative and Qualitative Methods. (Much like current “gen ed” and “distribution requirements,” the level of mathematical ability required would likely vary by field, though no one should be obtaining a college degree without some degree of numerical competence.)

But the real problem with the social science fields is not lack of rigorous statistical background, but overwhelming ideological conformity, enforced by the elders of the fields–advisers, hiring committees, textbook writers, journal editors, etc., who all believe in the same ideology and so have come to see their field as “proving” their ideology.

Ideology drives both the publication biases and the wishful thinking that underlie this crisis. For example, everyone in “Women’s studies” is a feminist who believes that “science” proves that women are oppressed because everyone they know has done studies “proving” it. You’re not going to find a lot of Women’s Studies professors aiming for tenure on the basis of their successful publication of a bunch of studies that failed to find any evidence of bias against women. Findings like that => no publication => no tenure. And besides, feminist professors see it as their moral duty to prove that discrimination exists, not to waste their time on studies that just happened not to be good enough to find the effect.

In the Social Sciences more generally, we get this “post modern” mish-mash of everything from Marxists to Freudians to folks who like Foucault and Said, where the goal is to mush up long-winded descriptions of otherwise simple phenomena into endless Chomsky Sentences.

(Just reading the Wikipedia pages on a variety of Social Science oriented topics reveals how very little real research or knowledge is generated in these fields, and how much is based on individual theorists’ personal views. It is often obvious that virtually anyone not long steeped in the academic literature of these fields would not come up with these theories, but with something far more mundane and sensible. Economists, for all their political bias, at least provide a counterpoint to many of these theories.)

Obviously different fields study different aspects of phenomena, but entire fields should not become reduced to trying to prove one political ideology or another. If they are, they should label themselves explicitly, rather than make a pretense of neutrality.

When ideology rather than correctness become the standard for publication (not to mention hiring and tenure,) the natural result is incorrectness.

More statistical knowledge is not, by itself, going to resolve the problem. The fields must first recognize that they have an ideological bias problem, and then work to remedy it by letting in and publishing work by researchers outside the social science ideological mainstream. It is very easy to think your ideas sound rigorous when you are only debating with people who already agree with you; it is much more difficult to defend your views against people who disagree, or come from very different intellectual backgrounds.

They could start with–hahahaha–letting in a Republican.

The Marxist Meme-Plex as Cargo Cult of the Industrial Revolution

So I was thinking about Marxism, and how strange it is that it only ever really caught on in precisely the countries where it itself proclaimed it shouldn’t, and never became very domestically important in the countries where it was supposed to go.

It’s kind of like if there were a bunch of people going around proclaiming “This is what Mexican culture is like,” only none of them were Mexican, and actual Mexicans wanted very little to do with it–you might suspect that the stuff being called “Mexican culture” wasn’t all that Mexican.

Only we’re talking about overthrowing the state and killing a bunch of people, rather than tacos and Cinco de Mayo.

Marx proclaimed that Communism, (by which I mean Marxist-style communism inspired by Marx and written about by Marx in his many works on the subject, which became the intellectual basis for the international communist movement that eventually triumphed in the USSR, China, Vietnam, Cuba, N. Korea, etc.) was supposed to be the natural outgrowth of capitalism itself in industrialized nations, but the list I just gave contains only barely-industrialized or practically feudal nations.

Marx was, of course, a mere mortal; one cannot expect anyone to write thousands of pages and come out correct in all of them. Still, this is a pretty big oversight. A great deal of Marx’s theory rests on the belief that the form of the economic system dictates the culture and political system: that is, that capitalism forces people to act and organize in certain ways in order to feed the capitalist machine; feudalism forces people to act and organize in certain other ways, in order to feed the feudal machine.

So for the capitalist, industrialized countries to not go Communist, while a bunch of non-capitalist, non-industrialized do, seems like a pretty big blow to the basics of the theory.

Kind of like if I had a theory that all noble gases were naturally magnetic, and all metals weren’t, and yet metal things kept sticking to my magnets and noble gases seemed relatively uninterested. I might eventually start thinking that maybe I was wrong.

Of course you can pick and chose your Marxism; you might like the idea of the “commodity fetish” while throwing out the rest of the bathwater. Have at it. But we are speaking here of believing both broadly and deeply enough in Marx’s theories to actually advocate overthrowing the state and murdering all the Kulaks.

My own theory is that Marxism appealed to the wrong group of people precisely because they were the wrong group of people.

Actual scientists tend to have little interest in pseudo science. Actual members of a culture don’t get excited by fake versions of their culture. And people with actual experience with industrial capitalism have little interest in Marxism.

In short, Marxism became a kind of myth among unindustrialized or barely-industrialized people about what would happen when the factories came, and so believing the myth, they made it happen.

Marx had intended to create a “science;” describing patterns in his data and thereby making predictions about the future. When that future didn’t happen, the first reaction of his followers was to double down–the theory must not have worked because evil bad people were sabotaging it.

(If it happens naturally, why would it have saboteurs?)

Many people have accused Communism of being a religion–an atheistic religion, but a religion nonetheless. SSC wisely asks Is Everything a Religion?–since practically everything does get described as a religion. EvenCargo Cult Programming.)

Every worldview–every meme-plex, as I like to call them–involves certain beliefs about the world that help people make sense of the vast quantities of data we absorb every day and make predictions about the future. My observation of the sun rising leads me to believe there is a consistent pattern of “sun rises in morning” and that, therefore, the sun will rise tomorrow. “Science” itself contains many such beliefs.

Religions, like all other world views and meme-plexes, provide a way of organizing and understanding one’s observations about the world, generally through appeal to supernatural agents. (It rains because Zeus is peeing through a sieve; suffering exists because sin.)

The obvious reason belief systems get called religions is to insult them and suggest that they are irrational.

Of course, none of us is entirely rational; the idea that bags of rice that suddenly fell from the sky were the gift of the sky gods makes as much sense as any other if you have no other information on the subject. Scientists believe wrong and irrational things, too.

The critical difference is that science attempts to falsify itself–a theory cannot even be described as “scientific” if it cannot be falsified. All meme-plexes resist change, both because of human biases and because it’s probably a bad idea to try to re-formulate your beliefs about everything every time you happen across a single discordant datum, but science does attempt to disprove and discard bad theories over time–this is fundamentally what science is, and this is why I love science.

A faith, by contrast, is something one just believes, even despite evidence to the contrary, or without any ability to disprove it. For the deeply faithful, the reaction to evidence that contradicts one’s theory is generally not, “Hrm, maybe the theory is wrong,” but, “We aren’t following the the theory hard enough!”

The former leads to penicillin and airplanes; the later leads to dead people.

Note: I feel compelled to add that not all faith leads to dead people. Faith in Communism certainly did, however.

Marxists failed to admit information that contradicted their theories; they just killed people who contradicted their theories for being counter-revolutionaries.

 

Ten Commandments of the Constitution

It is perfectly easy to find people who treat the Constitution with a reverence oddly reminiscent of the way other folks treat the Bible–cultural meme-plexes don’t have to involve deities. It just helps, because, “Wash your hands because God says so,” is more effective than, “Wash your hands because it says so in this document.”