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1:09 PM · Jul 2, 2019Twitter Web App

Replying to @Triquetrea

How does it get ugly...?

Replying to

When you look at what people call "beliefs", it's easy to get tempted into a fairly cynical view, namely that it's all self-serving BS. This holds up pretty well on multiple levels of analysis. People *do* tend to profess a belief in theory and contradict it in practice.

You can see it everywhere. On a personal level, when parents teach their kids not to lie in order to make the job of raising them easier, then lie to them... for roughly the same reason. Religiously, say, with the Catholic Church breaking every single commandment for centuries.

And politically, say, with "pacifist" countries like Norway selling the US hellfire missiles they use to kill little children... I could be stuck here listing examples for days, but let's not waste time.

The point is, there are a lot of positive data points to suggest that beliefs, mores etc. are mostly just tools. And for many people and situations, this is completely true. But not always. Let's consider the other side of belief.

So Christians say "thou shalt not kill," then start crusades, pogroms, witch hunts, murderous pedophile rings... But what about that classic problem of military commanders everywhere, the pacifist soldier?

There is nothing self-serving about, say, refusing to fire on enemy combatants in a war zone, but that's often how people find out that they genuinely believe "thou shalt not kill": they can't fucking pull the trigger.

You would have to have your head as far up your ass as a DC chickenhawk to construe this as a selfish act. A lot of people who find out this fact about themselves (in war) don't really live long enough to share it, but some do.

My great grandfather, Roald, was a corporal in an artillery brigade in WW2, fought in Narvik. His company of light artillery was utterly outclassed by the heavier, more numerous Wehrmacht artillery. Took relentless shelling. People panicked. One of his men tried to desert.

So Roald did his duty and talked him down at gunpoint. Hated every second of it. But, as he wrote later, he knew he couldn't have pulled the trigger. And he hated himself for forcing that private to stay. After the war, he became a lifelong pacifist. He knew what he believed.

You see behaviour like this constantly, if you really look. My friend

@iwelsh

has spent decades shouting down the largest available megaphone that we're all going to be fucked if people don't learn to make better political choices. Often at great cost to himself.

So, perhaps rather few people are genuinely principled, or perhaps rather few of the principles people claim to have are really true. But they're there.

Yet on Twitter and elsewhere, I often see a particular form of rationalism that prides itself on applying terms like "ingroup" and "outgroup" to every imaginable situation. The standard seems to be "anything people say they believe is really just aesthetics or selfishness."

You can see that this has stopped being a pragmatic belief and become, somewhat ironically, an article of faith, in some cases. You see it when people project convoluted, selfish intent onto others because nothing in their earnest behaviour is really beneficial to themselves.

"Oh see, but they just say that to justify their belief that their ingroup has X beneficial characteristic, or they're signalling, or they're playing an angle I can't see. I know this because I can literally read minds, btw."

Ok they don't say that last part, but I wonder how else they might be so confident...

The way it gets really dangerous and corrosive is when it goes beyond mere snarking. When you earnestly believe (lol) that all beliefs are BS, morals and ethics become passé. It becomes a form of ingroup-oriented signalling to say 'look at how nihilistic I am'. This propagates.

By the way, I myself absolutely do believe that *most* of what anyone, including me, says they believe is nonsense. If you want to know what someone believes, look at behaviour across situational variables. There is truth.