Thank you for your insightful essay. I would like to share a few thoughts in response.
As you mentioned, Hugo Mercier argued that Voltaire was mistaken when he said, "those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Instead, Mercier proposes that it is "the desire to commit atrocities that makes you believe absurdities." However, I believe Mercier himself is incorrect. In my view, "it is the unconscious drive to succeed in evolution that makes you believe absurdities AND commit atrocities," a concept inspired by Steve Stewart-Williams's gene-machine from "The Ape That Understood the Universe."
Here’s how I think it works: Environmental cues indicating threats or crises trigger adaptive behaviors. Firstly, these cues prompt individuals to create largely false causalities to address the perceived threats. These constructed explanations often rely on existing myths or conspiracies to identify a cause that can be either combated (the out-group) or appeased (the gods), thus motivating belief in absurdities.
Secondly, these environmental cues provoke the formation of alliances and typical group dynamics, including both intra-group and inter-group competition, with significant social signaling involved. Within intra-group competition, humans often resort to spreading rumors, character assassination, and excommunication. For inter-group competition, strategies include demonization and dehumanization, often focusing on ethnic or religious features. Rather than risking the integrity of one’s own group by investigating the underlying causes of a problem, it is easier to blame someone else (scapegoat model). These are also strong motivators for believing absurdities.
If the threat increases and other less costly options fail (as discussed in Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature"), actors might resort to physical violence, leading to the "desire to commit atrocities."
All of this unfolds largely unconsciously, driven by intense emotions such as fear, disgust, and anger, pointing towards our motivational system and back to evolutionary psychology. Even when deliberate actions are involved, the underlying motives are likely unconscious.
It should be noted: that which has not been proven true is not necessarily false, but it often appears that way due to certain crucially important aspects of education being suspiciously absent from standard school curriculum.
Disagreement. I would say moral, ethical behaviour is most often not the result of goodness of character or philosophy, but conforming to social norms. In other words, if someone has weird hair, there is a higher chance they will rob you than if they do not.
Even when weird hair is not unethical and robbing people is, they correlate because both fashionable hair and not robbing people is just conformance to social norms, usually. People most often don’t make truly ethical choices but more like “what would people say?”
There is also "I won't rob you because you are of my tribe, not because you are human" and tribal membership is signalled by e.g. hair.
Very interesting—thanks for sharing. I hadn’t thought about the specific 2 mechanisms before. Some thoughts/questions come to mind:
1. It seems like wrongful demonization should harm the group’s overall success over time—eg outcasting a genius as a “weirdo” seems like it would inhibit the group overall. So does this mean we should expect groups that over apply this strategy will eventually fade (or at least evolve)? If so, what allows the strategy to persist? I suppose this is similar to your marketplace of ideas framework—that good ideas don’t always win. But it does seem like in the long run, cultural norms should drive this out.
2. It seems like someone could call “cancel culture” a recent form of this. Do you think there’s been an increase (vs. just a new term) and any thoughts on environmental conditions that would make groups more embracing of these strategies (i.e. what would have changed in recent times)? E.g. periods of fluid/ambiguous group definitions, uncertainty about truth makes it harder to verify, etc. Perhaps this is just an extension of your point about marketplace of ideas being susceptible to “market failures” under certain conditions, and wrongful demonization is one example.
> It seems like wrongful demonization should harm the group’s overall success over time—eg outcasting a genius as a “weirdo” seems like it would inhibit the group overall.
Evolution is the queen of greedy algorithms. Hence why evolving to extinction is a thing. The long run is just too, well, long to stop the proliferation of genes of weirdo-expellers.
Great post! Though I'm a bit confused about where you land on the extent to which people sincerely believe these demonizing narratives vs people operating on a principle of plausible deniability. You seem to describe it both ways in two adjacent paragraphs, though I'm probably missing some nuance here. (My two cents is that people usually do sincerely believe what they say, at least in the moment they're saying it, but that beliefs and opinions may often be inherently less stable/deep than they appear)
There is a countervailing aspect of human psychology to the one you have explored in this essay....one that has - ever since the French Revolution - made Leftist political postures so very seductive..... The Feel Virtuous Narrative. It is extremely powerful and (somewhat paradoxically) 'an education' is possibly more likely to intensify it than otherwise...... a theme that I have explored in many of my own Substack essays.
It's a long time since I read Eric Berne but I think he will have some good labels for both these human tendencies in his various Games People Play Transactional Analysis books.
Thank you for your insightful essay. I would like to share a few thoughts in response.
As you mentioned, Hugo Mercier argued that Voltaire was mistaken when he said, "those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Instead, Mercier proposes that it is "the desire to commit atrocities that makes you believe absurdities." However, I believe Mercier himself is incorrect. In my view, "it is the unconscious drive to succeed in evolution that makes you believe absurdities AND commit atrocities," a concept inspired by Steve Stewart-Williams's gene-machine from "The Ape That Understood the Universe."
Here’s how I think it works: Environmental cues indicating threats or crises trigger adaptive behaviors. Firstly, these cues prompt individuals to create largely false causalities to address the perceived threats. These constructed explanations often rely on existing myths or conspiracies to identify a cause that can be either combated (the out-group) or appeased (the gods), thus motivating belief in absurdities.
Secondly, these environmental cues provoke the formation of alliances and typical group dynamics, including both intra-group and inter-group competition, with significant social signaling involved. Within intra-group competition, humans often resort to spreading rumors, character assassination, and excommunication. For inter-group competition, strategies include demonization and dehumanization, often focusing on ethnic or religious features. Rather than risking the integrity of one’s own group by investigating the underlying causes of a problem, it is easier to blame someone else (scapegoat model). These are also strong motivators for believing absurdities.
If the threat increases and other less costly options fail (as discussed in Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature"), actors might resort to physical violence, leading to the "desire to commit atrocities."
All of this unfolds largely unconsciously, driven by intense emotions such as fear, disgust, and anger, pointing towards our motivational system and back to evolutionary psychology. Even when deliberate actions are involved, the underlying motives are likely unconscious.
It should be noted: that which has not been proven true is not necessarily false, but it often appears that way due to certain crucially important aspects of education being suspiciously absent from standard school curriculum.
Once again: is this purely an accident?
Disagreement. I would say moral, ethical behaviour is most often not the result of goodness of character or philosophy, but conforming to social norms. In other words, if someone has weird hair, there is a higher chance they will rob you than if they do not.
Even when weird hair is not unethical and robbing people is, they correlate because both fashionable hair and not robbing people is just conformance to social norms, usually. People most often don’t make truly ethical choices but more like “what would people say?”
There is also "I won't rob you because you are of my tribe, not because you are human" and tribal membership is signalled by e.g. hair.
Very interesting—thanks for sharing. I hadn’t thought about the specific 2 mechanisms before. Some thoughts/questions come to mind:
1. It seems like wrongful demonization should harm the group’s overall success over time—eg outcasting a genius as a “weirdo” seems like it would inhibit the group overall. So does this mean we should expect groups that over apply this strategy will eventually fade (or at least evolve)? If so, what allows the strategy to persist? I suppose this is similar to your marketplace of ideas framework—that good ideas don’t always win. But it does seem like in the long run, cultural norms should drive this out.
2. It seems like someone could call “cancel culture” a recent form of this. Do you think there’s been an increase (vs. just a new term) and any thoughts on environmental conditions that would make groups more embracing of these strategies (i.e. what would have changed in recent times)? E.g. periods of fluid/ambiguous group definitions, uncertainty about truth makes it harder to verify, etc. Perhaps this is just an extension of your point about marketplace of ideas being susceptible to “market failures” under certain conditions, and wrongful demonization is one example.
> It seems like wrongful demonization should harm the group’s overall success over time—eg outcasting a genius as a “weirdo” seems like it would inhibit the group overall.
Evolution is the queen of greedy algorithms. Hence why evolving to extinction is a thing. The long run is just too, well, long to stop the proliferation of genes of weirdo-expellers.
This subject begs for reference to Rene Girard
Any particular works you'd recommend?
The classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_the_Sacred is probably the best. He later became too invested in his ideas.
An interesting question: how much of this is organic, and how much of it is seeded into the memeplex by the government?
Great post! Though I'm a bit confused about where you land on the extent to which people sincerely believe these demonizing narratives vs people operating on a principle of plausible deniability. You seem to describe it both ways in two adjacent paragraphs, though I'm probably missing some nuance here. (My two cents is that people usually do sincerely believe what they say, at least in the moment they're saying it, but that beliefs and opinions may often be inherently less stable/deep than they appear)
I had the same thought.
There is a countervailing aspect of human psychology to the one you have explored in this essay....one that has - ever since the French Revolution - made Leftist political postures so very seductive..... The Feel Virtuous Narrative. It is extremely powerful and (somewhat paradoxically) 'an education' is possibly more likely to intensify it than otherwise...... a theme that I have explored in many of my own Substack essays.
It's a long time since I read Eric Berne but I think he will have some good labels for both these human tendencies in his various Games People Play Transactional Analysis books.