For
the Body, For
the Hate
2/11/11
I know it’s
been
a while since the last essay. I do
apologize for
keeping you all waiting, but I’m
sure
you’ll be pleased to know I’ve been spending that
time in the most productive way
possible: namely,
repeatedly e-mailing my ex to ask for endless clarifications about the
reasons
why she broke up with me until she finally called me the most pathetic
person
she has ever met in her life, said the weakness I continually insist on
displaying makes her too disgusted to have any respect for me, and
refused to
answer any more of my e-mails.
So,
mission accomplished there.
What’s
odd is that
for the past several weeks I’ve been dating a lingerie model with a
graduate degree in neuroscience who says she loves me more than anyone
else she’s
ever known and brings me to secret high-class orgies in Midtown
high-rises that require passwords and have people who speak German and
everything. This seems incompatible
with the prior
assessment of my market value on more than a few levels.
Naturally,
I have resolved the discrepancy by
deciding that the lingerie-model neuroscientist is completely
out of
her mind.
Why
didn’t I decide
that the woman who left me six months ago is out of her mind?
She
can’t be. She
said I was a pathetic loser — and that’s the
right answer, right?
Even her cat
agrees.
It is apparently a deep-seated
facet of my psyche
(whether this is
changeable
or not is a separate question, but currently it is) that if I
have one
woman telling me I'm the greatest guy she's ever met
and
another woman telling me that I am the most repellant loser she's ever
met, I will believe the woman who's telling me I’m
a loser and
assume
that there is something wrong with the woman telling me that
I’m great. This is, I suppose, arbitrary, since neither woman
can marshal
a superior amount of evidence. It is essentially a toss-up
which one of
them is right, but something
is
causing me to believe the one who says I’m
a loser.
(Technically, I suppose, it could be the case
that one woman
has only
ever met other men who are so terrible that I really am better than all
of
them, and that the other woman has only ever met men who are so awesome
that I really
am worse than all of them, but this seems so statistically improbable
that we
should probably discount it as a viable competing theory.)
Whether
it is
accurate to say that I am "choosing" to believe that woman is a complex
question — certainly, I am not consciously
experiencing the process of
making this choice (what it feels
like to me is that the one
saying I am
a loser is just “obviously right,” in the same way
that water is just “obviously”
wet), but if it would be possible
for me to think differently as the
result of
training myself to do so, then I suppose it is a “choice by
omission,” in the
same sense that an out-of-shape person is
“choosing” to be out of shape by
choosing not to
exercise.
I've always
maintained that it's better to believe something
true than
something
false; that you can’t believe something just because
it makes you feel
better. Religious people (and
all sorts
of other illogical types) do this, and I am against it. I
don’t just think it’s dumb — I think
it’s
dangerous. Believing something
just
because it makes you feel better about yourself is what dangerous
bigots
do. Like Voltaire said, if
they can make
you believe absurdities, they can make you commit atrocities.
I
swore long ago never to believe something
in the absence of sound evidence just because it made me feel better.
Well, it sounds
cooler to say I "swore," as though I were kneeling before my parents'
graves with a sword or something, but really I just sort of started
thinking that way at no identifiable time for no particular reason.
My parents are
both perfectly fine. Thanks for asking.
I
hardly think any
reasonable person will deny that the vast majority of common false
beliefs tend
to make the people who believe them feel better. If they
didn't, then they would not
be so common, since — unlike true beliefs — they could not have spread due
to
supporting evidence. Most of the
examples that spring to mind, from the belief in an afterlife
to
the belief that your kid keeps bombing standardized tests because
he’s too
smart, are beliefs about the world
external to the believer, because those are the kinds of beliefs people
discuss
publicly. It
seems, then, a fair bet
that most people also have a goodly amount of comforting false beliefs
about
themselves, even if we hear about those far less often.
In
other words, you
don’t need to be stupid to be confident, but it sure helps.
Only
something
doesn’t add up. This all makes
perfect
sense in terms of a person who sucks but mistakenly thinks
he’s awesome — a false
belief, and one which he is able to have as a result of being
stupid.
But
what about me? I am a person who is awesome but mistakenly
thinks he sucks — an equally
false belief that I somehow have despite
being smart.
Or, quite
possibly, as a result
of being smart. Stick with me here.
I and others have suggested that religious faith
is pernicious not
simply on
the grounds of the ills caused by religious beliefs themselves, but on
the
grounds that religious training conditions people to react inaccurately
in all
situations, not simply ones directly related to their religion (in the
same way
that a computer virus screws up everything on your computer,
not just the program with the
corrupted file). Religious people are
overwhelmingly more likely to conclude based on
absolutely nothing that something they don’t want to be true
simply can’t
be
true — global warming, for example.
What never occurred to me was that the reverse
might well also be at play:
that rationalist
atheism conditions you to adopt as your “default
setting” the more difficult
or more depressing
belief. Naturally, this is an independent concern from
whether atheism is factually true.
Despite what Christians
say, the happiness of fundamentalists does not prove the existence of
God, any
more than the happiness of racists proves racism.
If I am on to something here, then we have a hell
of a paradox on our hands: namely, a
situation
where believing one big important true thing causes
you to also believe
any number of lesser false things. If this is the case, then
my vow to believe true things becomes impossible to
apply, like
the
method of
execution in that “You will boil me in oil” riddle.
Most
people would
agree with the statement “It is impossible for any individual
to be right about
everything” — but for a reason other than the one I
now have in mind. Most of us have
probably assumed that this
was true because it is impossible for any one person to be that
smart; in other
words, we saw it as a statement about the limits of human
ability.
But
it actually might be a statement about
the way that
beliefs
themselves
interact with one another in the mind: there
might be a way in which
being
right about Thing X automatically
causes
you subsequently to be wrong
about Thing Y (or, at the very least, substantially raises the odds
that you will be).
At
this point, there’s
a risk that a religion-defender will jump in and suggest that,
regardless
of the truth value of the
statement “God exists,” religion is good if belief
in God causes you to be
right about a greater number of other things than atheism does, so
before
anything else I have to nip that loophole in the bud by pointing out
that the
track record of religion (geocentrism, witch trials, creationism,
anti-gay lunacy,
anti-condom lunacy, etc.)
establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that this
cannot possibly be the case.
And as
long
as I’m nipping loopholes in the bud, if you’d like
me to get a sacred cow down
to brass tacks or mix any other metaphors, just drop me a buzz on the
web.
Now, the
definition
of “loser” is vague and
up for
debate, of course. But so
is the definition of “God.” As you may
remember from previous essays, I
have addressed this with reference to “God” by
choosing to identify myself as a
Theological Noncognitivist rather than an Atheist — i.e., as
someone who answers
the question “Do you believe in God?” by saying
“The term ‘God’ is meaningless
until such time as someone defines it, so go ahead and define it,”
rather than “No, I do
not.” So, should I do the same thing with
reference to the term “loser?” That is,
dismiss the debate itself on the
grounds that the key term is nonsense, and thereby remove the question
as a
factor around which I am ordering my life in one way or
another? It may
seem like this is a good idea, and the philosophically sound thing to
do.
There's only one problem.
The problem is, that's
just
what a loser would say.
Saying “there is no such thing as a
loser” is
clearly a cop-out. Granted,
there is no such thing as a loser objectively,
but there are plenty of
pretty important concepts that don't have objective meaning
either — human life,
for example. Religious people always try to argue that if
there is no God
then life is meaningless, but no it's not, because it has meaning to
us,
and if something has meaning to
us then it has meaning period,
because there is no way for us to access meanings that reside somewhere
other
than the human mind (obviously). And the term
“loser” clearly has meaning
to us. It didn't exist as a concept in all cultures at all
times, but so
what? Neither did the term “rock star,”
and yet the term “rock star” clearly
means something.
Well, it used to, anyway.
Similarly,
we cannot
do away with the term “loser” merely on the grounds that
people occasionally disagree
about who is or is not one. This would
be making the same error (or lie,
in
the cases of those who know
it is
wrong but argue it anyway) that feminists make when they try to argue
that
physical attractiveness is a null concept just because people sometimes
disagree about what is physically attractive. Even
though people
often differ on the finer points, there clearly is
still such a
thing as physical attractiveness. And
there is also such a thing as losers.
Invariably,
someone will suggest that whether you
are
a
loser is a simple matter of
whether you think
you are a loser: if
you think you’re cool, then you’re cool, and if you
think you’re not, then
you’re not. And this is an argument
that
I have never been able to sign off on, for reasons that I now feel were
inextricably wrapped up in my opposition to religious faith.
This
is why I
always misunderstood people’s advice to just stop believing I
was a loser: I
thought they meant that I should stop believing I was a loser even
though I really am one, just because it
would make me feel better. And
I
couldn’t do that, because if I did that then I would be no
better than a
religious person. I thought the people
giving me this advice were saying “Hey, whatever, who cares
what’s true?” — an
attitude I find deeply offensive. In
order to honorably
stop believing
that I was a loser, I would have to stop being
one first,
and be able to prove
it.
So, this begs
the question of which condition is the presence and which the absence:
are you
a loser in the absence of evidence that you are a winner, or are you a
winner
in the absence of evidence that you are a loser? In
other words, which one is the Teapot,
loserdom or winnerdom? I always just
naturally
assumed winnerdom was the Teapot — evidently because
it’s more
depressing that way.
You might be
thinking that all this “insufficient evidence”
stuff is merely an excuse, and
that I’m just a wuss who can’t assert himself. But that
isn’t the case. I
remember the day I went to the Museum with my ex: I had a
panic attack
on the train because I thought these two lesbians were mad at me for
being muscular, but then inside the Museum I overheard a
woman saying she didn’t
believe in evolution and immediately bolted over to argue with
her, even
though she was pretty and her boyfriend was twice my size. I
have no problem at all being downright
psychotically aggressive when the matter at hand is an external issue
where the
evidence is on my side. Hell, I once
waited outside a bookstore for two hours to fight this one guy when he
got out of
work because he said the Beatles sucked. I
can stand up for
myself about everything but myself.
I
knew for weeks
leading up to it that the woman who left me last summer was going to
leave me
if I didn’t stop thinking I was a loser, but there was
nothing I could do — the
principle of the thing was too important. She tried
many
times to convince me that I wasn’t one, but I was
always able to out-argue her. Eventually,
she just
stopped trying.
It
was very
tempting to believe that whether you are a loser is a simple matter of
whether
you believe yourself to be one — but I could prove it
wasn’t. For example,
let’s say there is a fat virgin
who hangs out at Renaissance Fairs in costume and communicates
exclusively in
Monty Python quotes, but believes
that he is the coolest guy alive. Does
this mean he’s not a loser? Of
course
not. He is still
incontrovertibly a
loser, and a rather huge one at that. Therefore,
whether you
are a loser is true or false independently of
whether you believe yourself to be one. QED.
Or
not.
I’m
so used to
saying Just
because you believe
something, that doesn’t make it true
(to religious people, feminists, etc.)
that it never occurred to me there might be some
situations where the fact that you believe something does
in fact make it true, or at least
contributes
to making it true. The
statement at the beginning of this paragraph would more accurately be
expressed
as Just
because you believe something,
that doesn’t always
make it true. I have spent so much
time arguing with people in situations where this
principle applies that I never realized there could be
situations where it doesn’t.
My
approach to the
question of whether I am a loser has always been to search
for evidence
that I am not a loser and, if unable to find
it, revert to the assumption that I am one. The
evidence for
whether or not someone was a loser had always been
external growing up, so why would I assume that it would be internal
now? In grade school, it was
objectively true that
I sucked at sports, that I did not own the right kind of sneakers, that
my mom
cut my hair, etc. All of these things
were beyond my control and true irrespective of whether I believed them
to
be. (What you think of
yourself is also a
factor to some extent in grade school, but it’s not as
important as a laundry
list of various other totems.)
And
the example I
always used — the fat Ren Fair dork who thinks he’s
awesome but obviously
isn’t — seemed to confirm that this is still how it
works, even after you get out
of school. The problem was, I
didn’t know
what the things on the laundry list were anymore. In
school, I didn’t have
any of the things on the list, but at least I knew what was on
it. As an adult, aside from
being decent-looking
and having a job (on both of which I pass muster), the rest is a
mystery — but
there clearly still is a “rest.” And
the
rest can’t be purely psychological, because the Ren Fair dork
with inexplicably
high self-esteem proves it isn’t.
Right?
Only
very recently
have I figured out my error: namely, the Fallacy of the Ideal
Example.
I
thought up a hypothetical guy who was still
a loser despite thinking he was not one — but only because he
possessed every
single criminally dorky trait
imaginable. Whether
it is even possible
in real life for such a person
to be unaware that he is a loser is very much an open
question. My example was so
insane that it was actually an
example not of a rule, but of an exception to that rule. I
made the same error as a right-winger who
argues that torture is justifiable in all cases based on the fact that
it was
justifiable in a single highly improbable situation on this one episode
of 24.
The
truth is, once
you are an adult, whether you think you are a loser is far
and away the most important determinant
of whether you are
one.
Yes, it is possible to
think up
examples that violate this — i.e., examples of people whose
other debits are so
extreme that they outweigh self-image when they’re all added
up — but such
examples would occur very rarely in nature. For
the purposes of
day-to-day life under all likely circumstances, it is
fine to say that whether you’re a loser just depends on
whether you think you
are one, in the same sense that for the purposes of day-to-day life it
is fine
to say that E=mc2,
even though it
actually only does for a massive particle in its own rest frame
(because good
luck bumping into anything besides massive particles in their own rest
frames while
in line at Starbucks).
The
answers to the questions of
whether God exists, whether porn
causes rape, and whether aliens built the pyramids are true
independently of
what anyone believes (and are “no”). These
are questions
about matters external to the self. The
question of whether I am a loser is
not. It is not only affected
by what I myself believe the answer to be, but is affected
by that more
than by anything else.
So from now on,
if
you ask for evidence
that I am not a loser, my response will be to laugh at you.
And
I won’t be dodging the question, because
my laughter itself
will be
the
evidence.
Oh,
and also the German orgies. Which I go to with my girlfriend.
Who is a lingerie model. |