From Extraordinary Popular Delusions to 2012
This morning (January 10th) I watched the 2007 documentary “Garbage Warrior,” about green architect Mike Reynolds’s travails to get regulators to approve his dwellings constructed out of recycled materials: tires, plastic bottles, cans, etc. He was foiled by local building departments in rural New Mexico, so he took his plans to the state legislature and was again rebuffed. Following the 2004 tsunami, he was invited by the Indian Andaman Islands to build his recycled homes in that devastated region and succeeded in bringing that project to fruition. Reflecting on Reynolds’s experience, I thought to myself if anyone has reason to become a libertarian it’s this guy. Other than a few swipes at the Bush administration by his legislative consultant (she helped him write a bill that almost passed the New Mexico legislature that would have permitted his type of dwellings) I don’t know much about Reynolds’s politics, other than his environmentalism. But I did find it rather irritating that his rationale as to why his type of architecture needed immediate approval was the threat of so-called manmade global warming. Energy efficiency that might decrease our dependency on foreign oil, reduction of air and water pollution, nothing else would do. It has to be this imminent threat of planetary destruction by mankind because we won’t listen to the global warming alarmists. Meanwhile, the East Coast is experiencing record breaking freezes, but I suppose that too is a result of anthropogenic global warming.
So one might reflect, what is it that causes so many creative people to fall for such hype? Shouldn’t we become suspicious when Big Government, Big Business, the educational establishment (Big Ed), and the Mainstream Media are all pushing the same agenda non-stop? I saw part of “Lions for Lambs” the other day too and Robert Redford, playing a college professor, gives a student a self-righteous speech as to why he shouldn’t take a lucrative job on Wall Street, the implication being he should fight the good fight along with Redford against corporations and, no doubt, the Republican Party. Now far be it for me to defend Wall Street, but doesn’t it ever occur to these shills (or useful idiots) that Big Government is every bit as corrupt as the mega corporations and that in fact, they might be in bed together more often than not? Doesn’t it ever occur to them that most of those pushing the climate change agenda either stand to make big bucks (like G.E. or Al Gore) or would benefit by a big power grab by the State? No, I guess not.
I recently read Charles MacKay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, first published in 1841, which MacKay wrote at the tender age of 27. The book is a compendium of human folly from the Mississippi scheme of 18th century France to the South Seas Bubble of 18th century England, the Tulipomania of 17th century Holland, the Crusades, Alchemy, and the witchcraft hysteria. Human folly has a long and illustrious past at a great cost in human lives and wealth. I have often reflected in my work as a mental health clinician that it is not only the mentally disordered who are afflicted with delusions. Don’t we all have our cherished delusions, whether it might be falling in love with the wrong person, betting one’s life savings on the latest ponzi scheme, or, in fact, believing the latest myths promoted by our government, the media, or our schools. Psychology has several concepts that may help explain human vulnerability to manias and hype, and our resistance to abandoning our most cherished myths. One such concept is confirmation bias:
a tendency for people to confirm their preconceptions or hypotheses, independently of whether or not they are true. People can reinforce their existing attitudes by selectively collecting new evidence, by interpreting evidence in a biased way or by selectively recalling information from memory. (Wikipedia)
Have you ever noticed how in the world of party politics, political operatives always see their side as “all good” and the opposition as “all bad.” Aside from a criterion for Borderline Personality Disorder, this could either be plain old fashioned deceit, or, when genuinely believed, an example of confirmation bias. An earlier version of this concept is the Tolstoy Syndrome, named after Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). In an article by Andrew Sullivan, “Bush’s Tolstoy Syndrome” (The Atlantic Monthly, 10-10-06), Sullivan has defined the syndrome as “a description of a behavior of humans who ignore the truth despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” Sullivan quoted Tolstoy as follows:
“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabrics of their life”.
A related Tolstoy quote is
“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”
Another psychological concept is cognitive dissonance, which Wikipedia defines as follows:
Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The “ideas” or “cognitions” in question may include attitudes and beliefs, the awareness of one’s behavior, and facts. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, or by justifying or rationalizing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.[1] Cognitive dissonance theory is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology.
Wiki goes on to state that ideas that conflict with one’s self-concept are a “powerful cause of dissonance,” as for example, one’s belief that one is a “good person.” We all want to believe that we are good persons. Well, most of us anyway. Cognitve dissonance often leads to confirmation bias.
One of the first works in the field of social psychology was Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd, first published in French as Psychologie des foules in 1895. Le Bon was quite aware of the human tendency to go along with the crowd. He wrote: “To belong to a school is necessarily to espouse its prejudices and preconceived opinions” (p. 4). He also defined dogma as “the tyrannical and sovereign force of being above discussion” (p. 16). Of course it is well know by all who attend to the pronouncements of our fearless leaders and celebrities that anthropogenic global warming (scratch that: climate change) is now an indisputable “settled” fact, a consensus opinion beyond debate. As Walter Williams has written in “Global Warming Is a Religion” (townhall.com, January 13, 2010):
A few years back, Dr. Heidi Cullen, the Weather Channel’s climatologist, advocated that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) strip their seal of approval from any TV weatherman expressing skepticism about the predictions of manmade global warming. Scott Pelley, CBS News “60 Minutes” correspondent, compared skeptics of global warming to “Holocaust deniers.” Former Vice President Al Gore called skeptics “global warming deniers.” But it gets worse. On one of her shows, Dr. Cullen featured columnist Dave Roberts, who, in his Sept. 19, 2006, online publication, said, “When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.”
Science be damned! Hang all dissenters to the true and revealed Orthodoxy! Maybe we could have a Climate Change Inquisition? Global warming is perhaps the greatest popular delusion of the past decade, not because the earth had not been in a warming trend for much of the last century, but because even though the scientific evidence has been largely speculative and inconclusive regarding how much of that trend was manmade, whether it was continuing, and whether or not mankind could have any predictable effect upon future warming, the intelligentsia, the political class, and the media have implemented a massive, worldwide campaign of hype to convince the multitudes on the flimsiest of evidence that it was beyond dispute. That’s why Williams, in the above article, calls it “The Religion of Global Warming.” It’s about unquestioning belief, not about empirical science, at least on the part of the general public, and unfortunately, on the part of many so-called scientists. As I alluded to above, I have nothing against pursuing ends that would decrease our dependency on foreign oil or reduce air and water pollution, although I prefer free market solutions for the most part. But the whole global warming movement seems to me to be an excuse for statists and socialists to usurp more power for a government that is already bloated out of any reasonable or Constitutional proportion. Excessive government spending has already so indebted this nation, compliments of our political leadership, that future generations have been condemned to either poverty or national bankruptcy. We already work half of every work year for Uncle Sam, but apparently that’s not enough for the promoters of the Leviathan State. By the way, I thought they said we fought the Civil War to end slavery: If we work our whole lives for the State haven’t we all truly become slaves?
The movie “2012” was recently released, surely to be a hit with the more gullible adherents of the New Age left who have subscribed to a mania for the prophecies that the year 2012 will be the end of the human race and planet earth. The History Channel has been rife for years now with the prophecies of Nostradamus and the Mayan Calendar that the world will end in some sort of apocalyptic conflagration in the year 2012: More support for the imminent dangers of manmade global warming no doubt, but of an outright unscientific nature. Why anybody would believe the prophecies of a people that practiced human sacrifice is beyond my comprehension and Nostradamus’s writings are so obscure that one could read almost anything into them. One might well christen our era as the “Age of Hype,” or if not that, “the age of b.s.” Maybe this is the End of Times: I don’t know, but I sincerely doubt that most of our current crop of arm chair prophets knows either. Besides, would you really want to know when your end, or when the end of the human race, was to be? And if so, do you really suffer from the hubris that you, even with the cooperation of the rest of the human race, could prevent an apocalyptic worldwide natural disaster, let alone change the climate of planet earth?
This morning (January 10th) I watched the 2007 documentary “Garbage Warrior,” about green architect Mike Reynolds’s travails to get regulators to approve his dwellings constructed out of recycled materials: tires, plastic bottles, cans, etc. He was foiled by local building departments in rural New Mexico, so he took his plans to the state legislature and was again rebuffed. Following the 2004 tsunami, he was invited by the Indian Andaman Islands to build his recycled homes in that devastated region and succeeded in bringing that project to fruition. Reflecting on Reynolds’s experience, I thought to myself if anyone has reason to become a libertarian it’s this guy. Other than a few swipes at the Bush administration by his legislative consultant (she helped him write a bill that almost passed the New Mexico legislature that would have permitted his type of dwellings) I don’t know much about Reynolds’s politics, other than his environmentalism. But I did find it rather irritating that his rationale as to why his type of architecture needed immediate approval was the threat of so-called manmade global warming. Energy efficiency that might decrease our dependency on foreign oil, reduction of air and water pollution, nothing else would do. It has to be this imminent threat of planetary destruction by mankind because we won’t listen to the global warming alarmists. Meanwhile, the East Coast is experiencing record breaking freezes, but I suppose that too is a result of anthropogenic global warming.
So one might reflect, what is it that causes so many creative people to fall for such hype? Shouldn’t we become suspicious when Big Government, Big Business, the educational establishment (Big Ed), and the Mainstream Media are all pushing the same agenda non-stop? I saw part of “Lions for Lambs” the other day too and Robert Redford, playing a college professor, gives a student a self-righteous speech as to why he shouldn’t take a lucrative job on Wall Street, the implication being he should fight the good fight along with Redford against corporations and, no doubt, the Republican Party. Now far be it for me to defend Wall Street, but doesn’t it ever occur to these shills (or useful idiots) that Big Government is every bit as corrupt as the mega corporations and that in fact, they might be in bed together more often than not? Doesn’t it ever occur to them that most of those pushing the climate change agenda either stand to make big bucks (like G.E. or Al Gore) or would benefit by a big power grab by the State? No, I guess not.
I recently read Charles MacKay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, first published in 1841, which MacKay wrote at the tender age of 27. The book is a compendium of human folly from the Mississippi scheme of 18th century France to the South Seas Bubble of 18th century England, the Tulipomania of 17th century Holland, the Crusades, Alchemy, and the witchcraft hysteria. Human folly has a long and illustrious past at a great cost in human lives and wealth. I have often reflected in my work as a mental health clinician that it is not only the mentally disordered who are afflicted with delusions. Don’t we all have our cherished delusions, whether it might be falling in love with the wrong person, betting one’s life savings on the latest ponzi scheme, or, in fact, believing the latest myths promoted by our government, the media, or our schools. Psychology has several concepts that may help explain human vulnerability to manias and hype, and our resistance to abandoning our most cherished myths. One such concept is confirmation bias:
a tendency for people to confirm their preconceptions or hypotheses, independently of whether or not they are true. People can reinforce their existing attitudes by selectively collecting new evidence, by interpreting evidence in a biased way or by selectively recalling information from memory. (Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias )
Have you ever noticed how in the world of party politics, political operatives always see their side as “all good” and the opposition as “all bad.” Aside from a criterion for Borderline Personality Disorder, this could either be plain old fashioned deceit, or, when genuinely believed, an example of confirmation bias. An earlier version of this concept is the Tolstoy Syndrome, named after Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). In an article by Andrew Sullivan, “Bush’s Tolstoy Syndrome” (The Atlantic Monthly, 10-10-06 http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2006/10/bushs_tolstoy_s.html ), Sullivan has defined the syndrome as “a description of a behavior of humans who ignore the truth despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” Sullivan quoted Tolstoy as follows:
“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabrics of their life”.
A related Tolstoy quote is
“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”
Another psychological concept is cognitive dissonance, which Wikipedia defines as follows:
Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The “ideas” or “cognitions” in question may include attitudes and beliefs, the awareness of one’s behavior, and facts. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, or by justifying or rationalizing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.[1] Cognitive dissonance theory is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
Wiki goes on to state that ideas that conflict with one’s self-concept are a “powerful cause of dissonance,” as for example, one’s belief that one is a “good person.” We all want to believe that we are good persons. Well, most of us anyway. Cognitve dissonance often leads to confirmation bias.
One of the first works in the field of social psychology was Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd, first published in French as Psychologie des foules in 1895. Le Bon was quite aware of the human tendency to go along with the crowd. He wrote: “To belong to a school is necessarily to espouse its prejudices and preconceived opinions” (p. 4). He also defined dogma as “the tyrannical and sovereign force of being above discussion” (p. 16). Of course it is well know by all who attend to the pronouncements of our fearless leaders and celebrities that anthropogenic global warming (scratch that: climate change) is now an indisputable “settled” fact, a consensus opinion beyond debate. As Walter Williams has written in “Global Warming Is a Religion” (townhall.com, January 13, 2010 http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2010/01/13/global_warming_is_a_religion ):
A few years back, Dr. Heidi Cullen, the Weather Channel’s climatologist, advocated that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) strip their seal of approval from any TV weatherman expressing skepticism about the predictions of manmade global warming. Scott Pelley, CBS News “60 Minutes” correspondent, compared skeptics of global warming to “Holocaust deniers.” Former Vice President Al Gore called skeptics “global warming deniers.” But it gets worse. On one of her shows, Dr. Cullen featured columnist Dave Roberts, who, in his Sept. 19, 2006, online publication, said, “When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.”
Science be damned! Hang all dissenters to the true and revealed Orthodoxy! Maybe we could have a Climate Change Inquisition? Global warming is perhaps the greatest popular delusion of the past decade, not because the earth had not been in a warming trend for much of the last century, but because even though the scientific evidence has been largely speculative and inconclusive regarding how much of that trend was manmade, whether it was continuing, and whether or not mankind could have any predictable effect upon future warming, the intelligentsia, the political class, and the media have implemented a massive, worldwide campaign of hype to convince the multitudes on the flimsiest of evidence that it was beyond dispute. That’s why Williams, in the above article, calls it “The Religion of Global Warming.” It’s about unquestioning belief, not about empirical science, at least on the part of the general public, and unfortunately, on the part of many so-called scientists. As I alluded to above, I have nothing against pursuing ends that would decrease our dependency on foreign oil or reduce air and water pollution, although I prefer free market solutions for the most part. But the whole global warming movement seems to me to be an excuse for statists and socialists to usurp more power for a government that is already bloated out of any reasonable or Constitutional proportion. Excessive government spending has already so indebted this nation, compliments of our political leadership, that future generations have been condemned to either poverty or national bankruptcy. We already work half of every work year for Uncle Sam, but apparently that’s not enough for the promoters of the Leviathan State. By the way, I thought they said we fought the Civil War to end slavery: If we work our whole lives for the State haven’t we all truly become slaves?
The movie “2012” was recently released, surely to be a hit with the more gullible adherents of the New Age left who have also subscribed to a mania for the prophecies that the year 2012 will be the end of the human race and planet earth. The History Channel has been rife for years now with the prophecies of Nostradamus and the Mayan Calendar that the world will end in some sort of apocalyptic conflagration in the year 2012: More support for the imminent dangers of manmade global warming no doubt, but of an outright unscientific nature. Why anybody would believe the prophecies of a people that practiced human sacrifice is beyond my comprehension and Nostradamus’s writings are so obscure that one could read almost anything into them. One might well christen our era as the “Age of Hype,” or if not that, “the age of b.s.” Maybe this is the End of Times: I don’t know, but I sincerely doubt that most of our current crop of arm chair prophets knows either. Besides, would you really want to know when your end, or when the end of the human race, was to be? And if so, do you really suffer from the hubris that you, even with the cooperation of the rest of the human race, could prevent an apocalyptic worldwide natural disaster, let alone change the climate of planet earth?
You also might enjoy these posts (selected just for you by Conservative Elves):
- Earth Hour? More Like “Have the Luddites Taken Control?”
- We Ain’t Going Back
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