Borsalino Test #32: Healing crystals and the nature of crazy beliefs
Healing crystals and the nature of crazy beliefs
The healing power of crystals
Everybody feels that their beliefs are pretty damn sensible. Sure we might harbor a bit of doubt here and there. But for the most part, we imagine we have a firm grip on reality. We don't lie awake at night fearing that we're massively deluded.
Oddly enough, we don’t feel the same about other people’s beliefs. It's an epistemic shit show out there. Astrology, conspiracy theories and the healing power of crystals. Covid vaccines that cause autism at worst and 5G signal amplification at best. Or the flat Earth. How could anyone believe this stuff?
I want to resist the temptation to dismiss such believers as crazy and just straight-up dumb. Along with "delusional," "gullible," and "needing the comfort of simple answers." Ultimately, these beliefs are held by human beings. I have (and want) to exercise empathy.
Let’s be honest here. I used to believe crazy things too. Ask my 10-year-old self on Christmas. Chances are, you believe some crazy stuff as well. I just have a hard time seeing them as crazy at every present moment. And God only knows what my crooked beliefs are now.
Ah yes, God. I used to believe in that one too.
The importance of looking good
People are embraced or condemned according to their beliefs. One function of the mind is to hold beliefs that bring the greatest number of allies, protectors, or disciples, rather than beliefs that are most likely to be true. The human brain has to strike an awkward balance between two different reward systems:
Meritocracy, where we monitor beliefs for accuracy out of fear that we'll stumble by acting on a false belief; and
Cronyism, where we don't care about accuracy so much as whether our beliefs make the right impressions on others.
We can roughly divide our beliefs into functional beliefs and social beliefs. Both contribute to our bottom line — survival and reproduction. Just in different ways. Functional beliefs by helping us navigate the world. Social beliefs by helping us look good.
Our brains are incredibly powerful organs. Yet, their wiring doesn't care about high-minded ideals like “The Truth”, whatever that is. They're designed to work tirelessly and efficiently, in our self-interest. So if a brain anticipates that it will be rewarded for adopting a particular belief, it's perfectly happy to do so. It doesn't much care where the reward comes from.
Mild or otherwise, these incentives are also pervasive. Everywhere we turn, we face pressure to adopt social beliefs. At work, we're rewarded for buying into the company’s mission - which is ultimately just a permutation of the same ethos. At church, we earn trust in exchange for faith. Even dating can put pressure on our minds, as potential romantic partners can filter us for our belief in the predictive power of stars.
Auntie’s Instagram account
Here are a few of the agendas we can accomplish with our beliefs:
Blending in. Often it's useful to avoid drawing attention to ourselves; as Voltaire said, "It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong." In which case, we'll want to adopt ordinary or common beliefs. “The Earth is a sphere”.
Sticking out. In other situations, it might be better to bristle and hold unorthodox beliefs, in order to demonstrate that we're independent thinkers or that we don't cow to authority. I suspect this is one of the key motives driving people to conspiracy theories and other contrarian beliefs. “The Earth is flat”.
Bootlicking. Being a yes-man or –woman, or otherwise adopting beliefs that flatter those with power, is an established tactic for cozying up to authority figures. Though we don't think of it as "sucking up" — we often use beliefs to demonstrate loyalty.
Showing off. We can use our beliefs to show off many of our cognitive or psychological qualities: intelligence, kindness, openness, cleverness, etc. A lot of the folks raving about crypto and web3 in my corner of Twitter are more concerned about signaling their deep understanding of a fully decentralized financial system than their appreciation for the idea itself.
Cheerleading. Believe what you want other people to believe. Drinking your own Kool-aid. Tooting your own horn. Over-the-top self-confidence, for example, seems dangerous as a private merit belief, but makes perfect sense as a social belief. This is the best and most “presidential” example that comes to mind.
Jockeying for high ground. This might mean the moral high ground ("Effective Altruism is the only kind of altruism worth doing") or some kind of social high ground ("Europe has so much more culture than the U.S.").
It's also important to remember that we have many different audiences to posture and perform in front of. These include friends, family, neighbors, classmates, coworkers, people at church, other parents at our kids' preschool, etc. A belief that helps us with one audience might hurt us with another. That’s why you pumped the breaks on silly Instagram stories ever since auntie created an account too.
Teenage smoking and the social role of beliefs
Many of the beliefs we hold are social in nature. They are usually visible to others, like the clothes we wear to demonstrate our independence and creativity and to signal our wealth, profession, and social status. So beliefs can also allow us to identify with groups. Remember high school?
A belief that Inter Milan will do well can help me associate with my locality. A belief that UFOs are aliens could help me signal that I'm an independent thinker, while a belief that UFOs are bunk could help me signal my scientific education.
Consider prime ministers. For them, there is little social monitoring and strong personal penalties for incorrect functional beliefs. We expect their belief system to be dominated by correct, functional beliefs in order to coordinate the right set of measures that will fend off the threat of Covid.
But for regular citizens with high social interest and little personal penalty for mistakes, the social role of beliefs dominates. Consider beliefs about large elections or beliefs addressing abstract philosophical, religious, or scientific questions.
It is a mistake to assume that the solution is to educate people about how to better construct more individually-functional beliefs. It is not obvious that, given typical preferences over functional vs. social outcomes, people are biased toward the social role of beliefs.
Just as it seems that teenage smoking can't be reduced much without giving teenagers good substitute ways to show their independence and coolness, the social costs of mistaken beliefs about crystals and UFOs probably can't be reduced much without giving people good substitute ways to show their concern and independence to others.
Survival of the nosiest
Social beliefs regulate what people read, how they treat the flag, and on which side of the road to drive. Diverse groups devote enormous resources to controlling choices in contexts that present no obvious impediment to allowing everyone complete personal discretion. “Society” and its beliefs are nosy because that’s part of our nature.
In many contexts where an agreement is not indispensable, we get urges to regulate the lives of others. We poke our noses into matters we could leave alone. We are “meddlesome” and that is a universal human trait. Meddlesomeness drives a huge variety of potentially personal choices into the collective realm.
The ubiquity of meddlesomeness is traceable to the division of labor. If we pursued all our activities in mutual isolation our choices would be without significance or consequence to others. Early human evolution conferred an advantage on individuals who showed an interest in each other’s activities.
Such individuals monitored each other with greater effectiveness, so they cooperated more successfully on matters important to survival. They thus left more descendants, predisposing our cognitive hardwiring to meddlesomeness.
Today, under conditions vastly different from those faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors, gossip is a universal pastime and soap operas have huge audiences because our circuits and switches remain adapted to taking an interest in the affairs of others. For the foreseeable future, we are stuck with a propensity to meddle in matters that we have no business with.
It has been about 500 generations since the rise of agriculture. By evolutionary standards too short a span for fundamental psychological readaptation. Our inherited psychology remains, therefore, essentially that which evolved during the hunter-gatherer age, a period that spanned at least 100,000 generations.
Fear of separation
Precisely because people who express different opinions do get treated differently, individuals normally tailor their expressions to the prevailing social pressures. They may communicate their choice through such means as articulating an idea, carrying a placard, or decorating their shelves with amethysts and moonstones. Depending on the context, even remaining silent or inactive may suffice to communicate a preference.
The individual’s dependence on society and his concomitant fear of isolation have been consistent themes in social thought. Because the variability of public opinion is linked to the variability of social pressures. The reason an individual might opt for preference falsification is that his public preferences influence how they are valued and treated.
At their core, nobody exhibits an absolute commitment to free speech. Even people who consider themselves tolerant are prepared to regulate public expression. They often achieve their objectives through acts that make it personally advantageous to express some views and disadvantageous to express others.
Consider advocates of identity politics, who ground their political agenda on gender, religion, race, social background, class rather than objective, functional beliefs. With their algebra of intersectional identities, everybody becomes an oppressor to them on some axis.
As a “social animal,” we derive emotional comfort from other members of the community. Without their approval, we would feel cut off and cut down. Community is also a source of physical comfort. Through participation in the social system, people gain access to protection, goods and services that they could not possibly acquire on their own.
Our collective conformism is mostly due to fear of separation, rather than to conformity pressures. Deviants are routinely made to feel uncomfortable. Among strangers, people tend to consider dissents imprudent. Justified or not, we feel pressured to fit in, and to avoid being pushed out.
The mosaic of our beliefs, whether true or not, largely determines the psychological distance between self and other, as well as between friend and stranger.