- There’s a spectrum of people from those who settle into narratives, believing things that are not true, and those who try to escape those narratives and try to perceive the real world;
- Paul Krugman on how MAGA is not grounded in reality;
- Right-wing obsessions with the Super-Bowl, and the congressional border bill, being “rigged,” for nefarious reasons; which I see as examples of the narrative bias gone carcinogenic;
- Philip Glass’s String Quarter #5
I suppose everyone believes things that are not true, if only because of the intuitive biases inherent in human nature that evolved to help the species survive, intuitions that help us live in the world we experience (especially the ancestral world on the Savannah), one of particular scales and durations, yet which are *not* true when applied to other scales and durations. (These latter are where the best of science fiction chimes in.)
But some people believe more things that are not true than others. As in all things, there is a range, a spectrum, of attitudes; not a black and white divide. Humans are driven by narrative bias and tribalism, and so rely on flattering stories about their own tribes/communities/nations for group cohesion and survival, and can dismiss objective facts up to the point (or perhaps beyond [vaccines]) where such denial actually does harm. Many people live their entire lives inside such narratives, of religion or nationalism, and as long as they manage to reproduce and create the next generation, blissfully unaware of the vast universe around them, dismissal of those facts does little harm.
The scientist and philosopher tries to think around those biases of human nature, to rely on evidence and reasoning instead, in order to perceive the truth of the greater reality of the entire natural world, the cosmos. They try to escape the provincialism of self-enclosed narratives. They’re at the far end of the spectrum, and a tiny minority of the human race. But it’s that minority that has driven the advancement of the human race, in terms of knowledge and health and technology, and which has thus built the modern world.
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So perhaps the key question is, at what point does living inside a narrative, and believing things that are not true, do actual harm? If not to those inside that narrative, but to society in general, or even to the species?
Paul Krugman, NY Times, 29 Jan 2024 (though in today’s paper): MAGA Is Based on Fear, Not Grounded in Reality
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