The best thing I ever did for my own intellectual honesty was to become an independent, because I no longer felt duty-bounded to defend the indefensible, because tribe.
That said - for most people most of the time, the fastest and surest way to wind up dead or seriously disadvantaged has been at the hands of our fellow humans. At the same time, "our group", whether by faith, family, tribe, regiment, frat, whatever, are the people we can most surely trust to have our back when we need support, when we are sick or threatened.
Therefore, whatever else happens, whatever we have to do, believe absurdities, participate in degrading rituals, risk our lives, blindly follow barking insane leaders, parrot obvious lies to our detriment, do or suffer terrible things, but please whatever you do, please don't kick us out of the group!
As a result, when people are presented with evidence, strong evidence, irrefutable evidence, evidence verging on philosophical proof, that their deeply held beliefs, the beliefs that people use to define themselves and tribe, are wrong, that the tribal leaders are crazy, stupid or malevolent, that we are headed to catastrophe - rather than change beliefs, change leaders, change tribe or change course, most people, most of the time will instead double down. Witness the behavior of cultists. Solzhenitsyn has documented true believer Communists heartfully confessing their guilt at a show trial because the Party demanded it.
The process is called "cognitive dissonance" and it is abundantly documented. As alluded to earlier, there are entire religions organized around the principle.
Cognitive dissonance is not limited to stupid people. In fact, the intelligent are at least as prone, perhaps because they are better at rationalizing. In fact, much so-called "knowledge work" is basically manipulating symbols in order to justify whatever the paymaster wants to see justified.
The best thing I ever did for my own intellectual honesty was to become an independent, because I no longer felt duty-bounded to defend the indefensible, because tribe.
That said - for most people most of the time, the fastest and surest way to wind up dead or seriously disadvantaged has been at the hands of our fellow humans. At the same time, "our group", whether by faith, family, tribe, regiment, frat, whatever, are the people we can most surely trust to have our back when we need support, when we are sick or threatened.
Therefore, whatever else happens, whatever we have to do, believe absurdities, participate in degrading rituals, risk our lives, blindly follow barking insane leaders, parrot obvious lies to our detriment, do or suffer terrible things, but please whatever you do, please don't kick us out of the group!
As a result, when people are presented with evidence, strong evidence, irrefutable evidence, evidence verging on philosophical proof, that their deeply held beliefs, the beliefs that people use to define themselves and tribe, are wrong, that the tribal leaders are crazy, stupid or malevolent, that we are headed to catastrophe - rather than change beliefs, change leaders, change tribe or change course, most people, most of the time will instead double down. Witness the behavior of cultists. Solzhenitsyn has documented true believer Communists heartfully confessing their guilt at a show trial because the Party demanded it.
The process is called "cognitive dissonance" and it is abundantly documented. As alluded to earlier, there are entire religions organized around the principle.
Cognitive dissonance is not limited to stupid people. In fact, the intelligent are at least as prone, perhaps because they are better at rationalizing. In fact, much so-called "knowledge work" is basically manipulating symbols in order to justify whatever the paymaster wants to see justified.