In email debate with a friend over the interpretation of a very important and presumably real event, as recorded in pictures and videos uploaded to the internet, we have reached an impasse of interpretation. We have had to 'agree to disagree'. We are not, as far as I know, disagreeing about the veracity of the evidential pictures and videos in themselves (were they doctored? are they fake?), but rather over what they reveal, or conceal, accepted as they are. On the interpretation of this event, as I say, a very great deal of a political nature hangs, but each of us would I think insist this has no influence whatever on our interpretation of the event itself as depicted! Our interpretation, we would each say, is dispassionate. We're each describing 'the facts'. We're rational creatures. Political loyalties are irrelevant!
So how come we don't reach the same conclusion? And, further, how come no amount of debate, it appears, will change our respective positions?
Our stubbornness reflects our certainty; but more than that: our commitment. We have each reached a floor of belief below which we can't, or won't dig. The buck has stopped. To go deeper (this is vital, friends!) would, we each seem to argue, be unnecessary, because we each already know everything necessary to the issue at hand. We have, as we say, made up our minds.
This isn't a trivial debate. We're not arguing semantics, like Do snakes bite or sting? So do you sense the utter unsatisfactoriness of this situation? Facts are facts, right? The inarguable bedrock of belief. Right?
The hell they are. Facts are beliefs! To bolster an empty claim to unassailable authority we have put the cart before the horse, and switched their roles. Each of our positions is, at best, an act of faith. You don't know what you don't know. You cannot - ever - know all there is to know. On the other hand (there you go!) to act at all requires a commitment to a particular interpretation of the way things are, and a concomitant exclusion of whatever conflicts with it. That decision made, the action that required the prior commitment now takes place, and the results of that action confirm or refute the prior commitment as appropriate, or mistaken. Even putting one foot in front of the other requires an act of faith which however is so often vindicated that we can safely consign it to the automatic - until (like my sister, or David A. here) we trip and break something! There follows a reevaluation of belief ('Gosh! Getting older; need to take more care!') as a result of augmented experience.
But much that we're committed to may be believed without the need for proof, because our belief in it (unlike walking) is self-validating. Our professed belief itself demonstrates our membership of and commitment to a particular collective. One can say that in this case the belief is the proof. It is self-evidentiary. Religion, and war propaganda fall squarely into this category, and to varying degrees so does any membership in general. Our community participation is confirmed by affirmation of a shared belief without which that community would not exist, and for whose definition a credo may therefore be necessary, and explicitly recited, to establish and maintain its identity, its reality - a pledge of allegiance. To hold a contrary opinion about any element of a collective belief is thus a form of disloyalty, even heresy, which if neither renounced nor able to bring about a change to the credo, must result in excommunication of the offending 'heretic', who accordingly becomes an outcast. That is the way human affairs are conducted, and I think in no other. Facts, let me reiterate, are shared beliefs.
We find ourselves today divided to a degree unprecedented in my lifetime. The division manifests as increasing, mutual incomprehension, as adherence to previously shared credos falls away, and what were 'facts' are questioned. If members of an organisation lose faith in its beliefs then 'How can they not see these facts?' the remaining members will ask. 'What idiots! How stupid!' And either repentance and recantation, or excommunication of the miscreants must inevitably follow.
So what has happened? The supposed 'facts' were actually a declaration of faith in a shared, community system. The two are indivisible; they define each other. They are in an important sense one and the same. The breakaway community now shares a different interpretation of the 'facts', and accordingly has its own adherents, and detractors, and deviants, and heretics, just like the original!
Here are some random examples of belief-based 'facts': same-sex marriage is currently inadmissible in the Roman Catholic Church, within which system it does not exist. You cannot as a Catholic at one and the same time claim to be married, and this to someone of the same sex. The thing is impossible, because it violates the faith you claim to believe in. If the whole world were Roman Catholic the apparently hard factuality of this belief would be inarguable. Queen Elizabeth the First did not have lovers. How could she? She was the Virgin Queen. Again, any claim to the British throne, that is incompatible with the officially approved genealogy cannot, by definition, be factual. It is verboten. You cannot object to an ex-male beauty queen on the grounds that she is a he, because the law says she is no longer a he, so the objection has no factual basis. And you may not even be able to object to a previously-defined male weight lifter competing against conventionally defined women, if no such sexual differentiation is acknowledged by law to exist. That our 'common sense' may rebel against this contortion arises from our adherence to more fundamentally held beliefs about the supposed biological differences between men and women. To continue, you cannot plausibly claim that the Sphynx is at least 9000 years old, because that would violate the archeological orthodoxy in which we are currently invested, as would belief in the existence of UFOs/UAPs, although such things are gradually creeping into factuality - materialising! - at a rate our authorities gauge the public can handle. You cannot as an American accept that JFK was assassinated by several shooters, because your own government says L H Oswald did it all on his own, even as it keeps extending the release date of the documentation that 'proves' it (or doesn't). You cannot accept that Mike Lindell, the 'pillow man', has proof the November 2020 election was stolen, because he's a white, Republican, Trump-loving bigot who can't live with the 'truth'. Nor can you claim Covid 19 shots are dangerous, because no less than the CDC, the WHO, the FDA and Rachel Maddow have declared them 'safe and effective', and to publicly claim otherwise is a punishable heresy.
In each and every case cited above the 'facts' are declarations of loyalty to a credo; sort of mini religions. Membership of this or that community of believers dictates the facts. And so to a final, concrete (and steel) example -
This, we're authoritatively informed, is a controlled demolition (CD), using meticulously placed charges, to bring down a tall, steel frame building whose uncontrolled collapse would be uneven, causing it to smash into neighboring structures.
And here's the actual case that prompted this post (you can click on the bottom right of the video to enlarge it): a tall, steel frame building, also brought down symmetrically, but we're as authoritatively informed, not by controlled demolition, but by the kind of damage - random fires - that supposedly make CD necessary.
I anticipate a certain amount of resistance to some, maybe all, of the above examples, plucked, except for the last, rather carelessly as they were from my current thoughtscape, and not yours. They're intended to highlight how our allegiances determine what we deem to be facts. We see what we believe. What is actually 'out there' who on Earth knows? But insisting that facts are beliefs does not mean I might take a fancy to leap from my office window, believing I could fly (as Rene has triumphantly invited me to do more than once)! No, of course not, but not because facts are hard and independent, unlike Peter Pan fantasies, but, more subtly, because chains of similar experiences that we continuously link together to make sense of the world (like my sister's, and David A's fall) forcefully suggest it wouldn't be a good idea, which is not quite the same thing. Knowing the effects of gravity from daily experience I won't launch myself wingless from my office window, hoping to soar skywards! But as wretched Eric Clapton will testify, a very small child may make exactly that mistake, for lack of prior experience, not for lack of a degree in physics, or from a failure to respect 'objective reality'.
Even a goat knows its limitations where heights are concerned, and Newton's theories be damned! Physical laws manifest in the act of being experienced. It's only later that we start to develop theories to explain them - and maybe in the process even dethrone Newton.
Who wouldn't experience cognitive dissonance if, like Winston in George Orwell's 1984, their Maximum Leader held up four fingers and insisted they were five? Structural engineers suffered a similar conflict of loyalties when shown what looked exactly like a controlled demolition on 9/11/2001 only to be told, after three years in which NIST struggled to come up with a plausible computer simulation that squared with the observable collapse without revealing a conspiracy, that it was caused by random fires. They may have 'gone along to get along', but their professional knowledge rebelled against such intellectual violence, and a community championing countervailing facts was born - Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911). Mainstream mouthpiece Wikipedia, true to form, calls them a group of 'conspiracy theorists', and thus the battle lines over 'facts' are drawn up. We see the same phenomenon again with the Covid-19 debacle; doctors everywhere suffering cognitive dissonance as they tried to square their medical training with the unprecedented and destructive medical mandates enforced by political authorities. And so, again, 'dissident' medical groups sprang up to counter the accusations of misinformation with platforms of their own, such as Children's Health Defense, America's Frontline Doctors, and La Quinta Columna. Not that their facts are more objective, but that they are loyal to, they claim, more long-lasting beliefs about disease and health than those advanced by politicians with power and an agenda to ram through without consultation with - or even ignoring - impartial, expert advice.
Fundamental beliefs and values will in general be ignored by a public brow-beaten by authority into violating them, as both the Milgram and the Asche experiments troublingly revealed. The Nuremberg trials notwithstanding, 'I was just following orders' is the universal get-out-of-jail-free card that excuses any and every action and inaction committed in obedience to authority. 'No man is an island'. Forced to choose, we respond more to herd pressure - authority - than to rational appeals, because the former represents the fund of experience upon which society has been built. Ours is generally not to reason why, because to question authority is an act of disloyalty to that upon which our security depends. Whistleblowers, like martyrs, are rare, because they risk excommunication and worse by challenging the authority structure with an assault on the accepted facts which dictate thought itself.
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Pablo
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