Why Do People Believe What They Believe?

I often read, and write comments on, the online news site Huffington Post. I am moved to write replies to people who express ideas counter to mine—such as "homosexuality is a sin (abomination, etc.)."  This may result in a back-and-forth dialog in which they in turn try to refute what I said.

Of course I have to suspect that no one convinces anyone. Neither they nor I am there to have my mind changed. Nor, generally, do we behave with open minds. So much of what we read only reinforces opinions we already hold. Liberals read liberal magazines, conservatives read conservative magazines. That's called "preaching to the choir." So we hear (or read) what we already believe because that's what we want to hear.

But as a thoughtful person—forgive a little patting-of-self-on-back—I wonder why people believe what they believe.

Often people have received their ideas, to put it simply: from parents, teachers, preachers. Of course that only begs the question, by moving it up, or back, to someone else, and then we have to ask why they believe. . . ad infinitum.

As to receiving ideas from one's teachers: it is commonly believed that education makes one more liberal. I'd agree, but would hasten to add that it depends on the kind of education. The business school student who reads Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman is going to have different ideas than the English major who reads John Steinbeck and Kurt Vonnegut.

Many people receive the ideas, attitudes, values, beliefs, etc., that are prevalent in their environment: their family, culture, church, etc. A great majority of people are not likely ever to doubt or question their beliefs. If and when people do question what they (and their family, etc.) have believed, it's often the result of something occurring. Something has occurred to shake a person's faith in God. A mother learns that her child is gay and starts to question the condemnations of homosexuality that she has heard all her life. The son of slave owners comes to feel that blacks deserve better treatment than they are receiving under the system of slave ownership.

There are characteristics of the individual at work sometimes. Those few people who question the beliefs received from their parents may possess a certain character--perhaps something like autonomy, or skepticism; at any event, what we might call an independent cast of mind. And, some people are more thoughtful, more "sensitive." This we might call personality, character, whatever. And they'd do well to have some courage, too, because they are going to be "on the outs" with their families, and that can be a difficult row to hoe.

I think people with a certain psychological makeup or personality type are more likely to be conservative, and there probably is something more or less parallel in the making of a liberal. And probably there is simply a certain mystery to it all.

Sometimes it's a whole culture that undergoes a conversion to new ideas. I was just reading some interesting ideas about why Hitler was as powerful and influential as he was. I think that's an interesting question. It's often been pointed out that here was a cultured nation, arguably the leader of the world in many fields of scholarship and the arts, that allowed itself to be led into an insane war and also to commit some of the worst atrocities in human history.

But maybe that was not so much a case of changing of minds as just stirring up and exploiting existing attitudes. The article on Hitler's influence said that the German people were already predisposed to anti-Semitism. But it did not go too much into the nationalistic ideas that had prevailed in Germany for a long time, nor Germany's wounded national pride as the result of its defeat in World War I and the humiliation (as they saw it) of the Treaty of Versailles. It's clear that all these things were going on.

Religious conversion might be an interesting case. If you look at they way in which many European cultures became converted to Christianity, often the king or other ruler was persuaded to convert—and then (certainly not miraculously!) the rest of the country converted, too.

Other times religious evangelizing has targeted individual after individual. One only has to think of missionaries, such as Mormon missionaries, who go door to door. So when this is successful, it is a case of changing people's minds. Christianity sometimes won converts because it promised an afterlife. It might be interesting to figure out what carrot (or stick) the Mormons use to gain converts; I'm neither inclined nor qualified to do this here and now.

So, back to my original question. Sometimes we can see where people's ideas have come from. Then there are the issues of whether and in what circumstances minds do or don't get changed. Sometimes we can see what has gone on. But to put it all in a larger perspective, human behavior is complex and very seldom explained simply.  We've got the science of the behavior of the individual—psychology—and sciences of the behavior of people en masse—sociology, political science, economics. I submit that none of these fields is so far advanced that we thoroughly, completely understand human behavior.

Revised and expanded April 29, 2013

Appendix A, Added April 29, 2013

Okay, now I would like to propose a question for my readers (with some possible answer choices). I pose this as a question put to my readers because, while this blog has, very gratifyingly, been getting a significantly greater readership lately, my postings—which sometimes try to be controversial and provocative—have not been getting any comments.

So, here is my question which at the very least I hope may provide food for thought. Why are conservatives anti-gay? Please feel free to vote with your answer or any other comment.

A. Because, in the sense of "conservative," they want to keep things as they are, and discriminating against gays is the way it's always been.
B. Because they subscribe to a brand of religion which is basically anti-sex.
C. It's their personality type. For example, they are tight-asses or maybe just mean and nasty people.
D. All of the above.
E. Some other reason (please specify).

Copyright © 2013.

Liberals and Conservatives (Again)

For those conservatives who complain about liberals: If you appreciate having clean air to breathe and clean water to drink, thank the liberals. If you appreciate having food and medicine that are safe, thank liberals. It's conservatives who want to gut the government's (the FDA's and EPA's) ability to ensure the safety of our food, medicines, water, and air. But public health is one of the major government success stories.

Ronald Reagan convinced much of the country that the government is the problem. But, if you think it through: Who do you want to provide you with police and fire protection? To build and repair highways? To put up traffic signals, or control air traffic? Are you going to get together with your neighbors to create organizations to provide these things? Then you've created a government!

Conservatives have also persuaded people that the government takes too much from them in the form of taxes, usually with the further thought that their taxes go to support no-good people who don't want to work--actually an appeal to racial prejudice and racial stereotypes.

But really, those who say these things are the wealthy whose motivation is to avoid paying tax themselves. If you are not also one of the 1%, they don't care what you pay. If you look at the facts (which seem to get overlooked in these arguments): the top income tax bracket under Eisenhower it was 91%. Under Nixon it was 70%. Under Ronald Reagan it was 50%. So it's been steadily going down for decades. It's currently 35%. (And since the top tax rate on capital gains is only 15%, the rich get a real break, and that is why billionaire Warren Buffet has told us that his secretary pays more tax than he does!)

Yet the super-rich are still not satisfied. Some conservatives go so far as to claim that if they've earned their money, they have the right to keep it. But court decisions have repeatedly upheld the government's right to tax its citizens, and anyone who rejects that is not just a conservative but an anarchist.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Richard Stein

Fourth Freedoms

Today is Independence Day in the United States—almost always referred to as "The Fourth of July."

Fireworks are traditionally associated with celebrating the Fourth of July. However, the law in some places is that fireworks can only be used by designated organizations, like municipal governments.

This state, Illinois, is one of those where shooting off and even possession of fireworks by individuals is illegal. (As to the reasons for such a law: Yes, it might be a case of the government trying to protect you and your children from your own poor judgment; but also, your fireworks might set your neighbor's roof on fire. It does happen.)

However, this illegality does not stop an awful lot of people. In this area, it's easy to drive to the next state and purchase fireworks, and then bring them home and shoot them off in your back yard, in front of your house (which might seem a bit more of a flagrant violation of the law), etc. The law seems to be very laxly enforced.

I suspect that many people consider it their God-given right to celebrate the Fourth of July with their own fireworks. Here, fireworks are going off right now and it's not even noon. And fireworks were going off last night and even the previous day—neither of which, of course, was the Fourth of July.

This made me reflect on who considers what to be their right.

Conservatives consider the following, among others, to be their right:

• To cheat other people by means of financial chicanery (if you are a Wall Street firm) or to deceive the public with false advertising, false product labeling, etc. (if you are a manufacturer).
• To not pay their fair share of taxes.
• To pollute or otherwise destroy the environment (again this applies to corporate entities).
• To own a gun.
• To drive as fast as they like, and without wearing seat belts.
  
• To impose their own religious and moral notions on others by banning books, forbidding mosques being built, banning abortion, and denying equal rights to gay people.

And here are some rights that many progressives ("liberals," if you will, although conservatives use the term as if it were a dirty word) feel they have, or should have:

• To be free from government spying.
• To have an abortion.
• To marry one's partner of the same sex.
• To be free from government-sponsored or –supported religious exercises.
• To read whatever they want.
  

Now I ask you, which group of rights causes more harm to the general welfare?

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Reagan (and Bush) on Energy and Consumer Protection

News has it that President Obama is installing solar energy-producing panels on the roof of the White House.

This item, and earlier ones, reminded us that President Jimmy Carter had also installed solar panels on the White House roof—and then Ronald Reagan removed them. Why would he do this, when it must have cost taxpayers money to remove them? My guess is, simply to thumb his nose at environmentalists.

Also, as is not very well known, on the day of his inauguration, Reagan froze all funding of alternative energy research by the Department of Energy. I can tell you that a lot of alternative energy research that is being called for today or has recently been started up, was going on in 1981 when Reagan halted it. On the smaller scale, Reagan's move cost many jobs (including, ultimately, mine—so yes, I have a personal axe to grind here) but it also set back the efforts to find new energy sources by 30 years.

Many of the bad things that Reagan did (okay, bad at least from my perspective, or any liberal perspective) were not publicized at the time. Reagan was very popular—remember, he was called "the Teflon President," and the Press was afraid to criticize him because of that popularity.

For example, he gutted federal regulatory agencies such as the EPA and FDA that were intended by Congress to safeguard our food, water, air, and so forth. He appointed as heads of these agencies industry-sympathetic people or even industry insiders who had no intention of allowing these agencies to function effectively.

Similarly, Congress passed laws to beef up (no pun) government inspections of food-processing plants. Had these measures taken effect, they might have prevented some of the recent outbreaks of food-borne illnesses such as Salmonella and E. coli from eggs, peanut butter, and so forth (there have been many in the last few years). But the stiffer inspection schedules were never implemented, because of eight years of foot-dragging by the Bush administration.

Update, August 26, 2011
I recently learned that Rodger Mudd, of CBS TV news, did at the time report on Reagan removing the solar panels from the White House. It was a very brief news item and didn't mention any possible explanation.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

Does Education Make Us Liberal?

It's widely known that better-educated people tend to be more liberal—or "progressive," as we might prefer to say since certain segments have done their best to make liberal a dirty word.

And studies have shown this, studies that have broken down voting patterns in the electorate by groups according to years of education.

(Big and important parenthesis: Of course not all college graduates, or even advanced-degree holders, are automatically liberal. It seems to me that people with certain degrees are less likely to be liberal. For example, people with MBAs are, not surprisingly, quite pro-business and often conservative according to other parameters as well. Maybe engineers are not the most liberal sorts, either.)

But the liberally-educated are liberal. (Is it a coincidence that the word liberal has these two uses?) For a long time I've contemplated why this should be so. I think important components of that education which produces liberals are literature, anthropology, psychology, and logic.

Literature and the other arts, I think, are the cornerstone of all this. I think that people who have been made acquainted with literature have undergone several processes: They have had their minds opened to a wider variety of experience and thus perhaps been made to have a more relativistic and less absolutistic viewpoint. (Studying anthropology should do this, too.) They have been exposed to writers' wisdom as to much of life and human experience, such that the reader can be sitting and reading in the most isolated and even (dare I say?) backward time or place and even so, through reading, travel the world and gain experience and wisdom and knowledge of other places and times.

Many writers, filmmakers, and artists of every sort are forward thinkers. Thus the audience whom these artists reach becomes exposed to less conventional viewpoints and perhaps encouraged to question a lot of received ideas and "truths." Remember, if it hadn't been for the value of education and the disseminating of the ideas of the forward thinkers, the radicals, many of us would probably still believe that the Earth is flat.

Psychology, too, teaches us valuable things. The people who have taken even Psych 101 and have learned about human perception would never pay much heed to the idea of seeing Jesus' or the Virgin Mary's face on a tortilla.

Studying logic might make us more immune to being swayed by, say, political advertising that slams an individual, rather than keeping to the issues. (In logic this is known as the argumentum ad hominen, attack on the person.) Nor as easily swayed by a lot of people who use whatever platform they've got to stir people up by means of rhetoric which, when examined, proves not logically sound. There are a lot of demagogues and such who simply use propaganda that will work on the less wary and will be seen through by those who know more about argumentation. Propaganda was used so well by Göbbels in Nazi Germany but propaganda was not new then and it has not disappeared since.

It might be another subject, how powerful interests manage to recruit masses of people to the views they want them to have, and I have touched on this in other postings.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein

Political Discussions Are in Vain

A gentleman named Michael Moakley has written,

. . . [T]he best way to lose a political argument is to carefully research the issue in question and support the resulting opinion with facts.

To me at least, that's one of those statements that immediately rings true. You know, and I know, that we almost certainly would not get anywhere arguing with one of those Tea Partyers. It's probably futile to even try to argue these things. We share our ideas with those who already agree with us, and we read magazines that reinforce what we already believe: liberal for liberals, conservative for conservatives. There's the old expression of "preaching to the choir" or "preaching to the converted."

Maybe I should not waste any more keystrokes blogging on political matters.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein