Humans sure are strange animals.
Once a belief is entrenched in a human, we would rather chew off our own arm than admit we were wrong. Literally. Once we believe in something and attach to it, it’s like a host binding with a parasite. Humans will act against their own economic interests. And against their own health interests. They will rather cling to a toxic belief against wearing masks or vaccinations then live. So many have needlessly died of a disease like COVID-19 for just this reason.
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This weird feelings/belief/entrenchment aspect of human nature, I believe, must have a developmental positive, in terms of human evolution. I have no idea if this is true, but I bet Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, would agree that it’s probably connected to the fact that humans evolved – and in fact are different than other animals – due to our superior imagination and unique ability to strongly believe in and rely on and coordinate around fictions like money, religion, and geo-political boundaries. It’s basically how we have attained dominion over the planet.
But there is a dangerous and scary downside to that entrenchment.
We see it with fascism and fundamentalism – modern Trumpism- and long-familiar institutionalized and engrained ideas like misogyny and sexism, racism, homophobia, and antisemitism. The same thing is at work with the anti-vax and anti-mask movements, the ‘isms’ of the pandemic.
Once they take hold they take root and persist, these ‘isms’ are fact-resistant. And malignant. We pass them down and replicate and recreate them through the media/pop culture we all swim in and in how we raise and educate our children.
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We’re hardly aware of these biases and malignant entrenched beliefs unless we really invest a lot of effort to un-learning what we’ve been taught and what is culturally reinforced.
It reminds me of the Michael Lewis book, “The Undoing Project,” which focused on unlearning our often useful but oft-wrong unconscious biases. As described by its Wikipedia page:
The Undoing Project explores the close partnership of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose work on heuristics in judgment and decision-making demonstrated common errors of the human psyche . . . The book revisits Lewis’ interest in market inefficiencies, previously explored in his books Moneyball (2003), The Big Short (2010), and Flash Boys (2014). It was acclaimed by book critics.
This all underscores the critical importance of being able to approach something new happening, or a new idea, with openness, as well as of being able to re-examine old ideas with openness, AKA “critical thinking.”
We seem to be losing that ability more and more.
Part of our modern condition is that we’re always moving too fast and we find it harder to pay attention. Our zones are being flooded. Sometimes with evil purpose.
And it’s worse than that. We are also being confronted with powerful and well-funded movements bent on maintaining their toxic belief systems in place. Look for example, at the movement against “critical race theory.”
This also highlights the terrible stakes to all of this and how critical it is to do as much as we can as a society to get it right the first time. Because when the malignancy roots, it’s here to stay.
It’s just human nature.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo Credit: ShutterStock
