GUEST BLOG: Bryan Bruce – Belief and Reason
That could be the title of a book or a PhD thesis – a topic too big for a 500 words or less Facebook post, but I’ll give it a go.
We may like to think we are rational beings but, ironically, the idea that we are creatures of reason is, in itself, a belief statement .
Why? Because there are many things we humans do that are not founded on analysis and proof. Things we do because ,well, that’s what our parents taught us or what ‘most people think’ around here and frankly if we sat around questioning everything we’d get very little done in a day.
When I get on a plane, for example , I believe I am going to arrive safely at my destination. I don’t think ‘ Should I interview the pilot to check that he or she is not suicidal?’ or ‘Should I take a course in physics or aeronautics to review the theory of flight before I take my seat ?’ I just put my trust in the pilot and that the people who build airplanes know what they are doing.
But of course my belief is flawed. Planes do crash – most often due to mechanical failure and pilot error and sometimes by an act of nature or terrorism. So my safe arrival is very likely but not assured and if I dwell on that fact too much I might develop a fear of flying.
Beliefs can become rules when they serve the public good. “Thou shalt not kill” for example. But then most of us can think of instances when we might belive it is right to kill someone – say if a member of our family was being attacked.
Beliefs often pander to our self- interest. Take for example the neoliberal belief spread by the economic evangelists of the 1990 ( Thatcher ,Reagan and in our own country Roger Douglas ) that giving tax breaks to the rich would help the poor.
How on earth did they manage to convince the voting majority of the day to adopt such an obviously flawed idea? Answer – because they delivered it lines that were crafted to appeal to our self-interest such as:
“Government is not a solution to our problem government is the problem.” ( Ronald Reagan)
and:
“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families” (Margaret Thatcher)
At the moment the world is awash with beliefs about how the Covid -19 pandemic started and conspiracy evangelists are gathering followers by preaching that somehow machiavellian power mongers somewhere are somehow going to make themselves the rich rulers of the world by making us all sick.
(And they believe this despite the fact that the financial elites of the world were doing really very nicely thank you manipulating the pre-covid economy).
Of course , as I say. I’m no stranger myself to beliefs.
Right now I’m hoping that this Covid 19 pandemic we are living through will foster the belief that cooperating with each other is better than competing with each other in order to meet our core needs such as food, shelter,health and education . That All of us are important to society not just some of us.
But – hey. That’s just what I believe.
Bryan Bruce is one of NZs most respected documentary makers and public intellectuals who has tirelessly exposed NZs neoliberal economic settings as the main cause for social issues.
Rockefeller’s Lockstep is the plan currently being followed by Jacinda.
We mostly imagine ourselves to be making decisions on our lives intellectually ,but what we mostly do is to make decisions emotionally, and then engage our intellect to rationalise that decision .The same goes for what we chose to believe out of the infinite range of contradictory stories we receive on every topical event or theory that is circulating out there.
D J S
Very true DS.
Nice.
Perhaps we are rational beings after all because our world view comes from trying to make sense of the reality we are given. Perhaps it is rational to believe in chaos if that has been our experience of the world. Perhaps it is rational to believe that we have to compete if we live in a world that we are told is organized around survival of the fittest and that is how success is talked about.
If your experience of the world is that the machiavellian power mongers in your life have personally abused you and marginalised you, then maybe it is rational to believe that they exist out there in the wider world and are an on-going danger to you.
It is not the rationality of individuals but the rationality of the context we need to address. What sort of world must people have people been living in that would lead them to believe such things?
Lets start flooding the world with stories about how cooperating with each other is better than competing. And stories about irrationality of neoliberal ideas.
Like you are doing.
thank you
p.s. I’m not sure the elites pre Covid were doing well.
Prior to about Sept 2019 they’d managed to bleed the economy to save their collective butts from the 2008/09 financial collapse.
But From approx. Sept 2019 the world economy was failing badly and showed signs that it was about to ‘collapse’. So C-19 was a convenient lie for them to blame the economic woes on and ‘not their doing’.
Yeah big business blames Covid 19 for the inevitable depression, but the blame doesnt wash when we can see that the pandemic itself was caused by the economic system itself. So capitalism facing a terminal decline causes global warming that causes ecological collapse including a pandemic that suddenly throws the global economy into depression.
No conspiracy involved. Just the fact that the tiny ruling class minority has the power to push the destructive effects of their failing system onto the working masses. That is why all around the world the masses are rising up against the effects of the system’s collapse and proving that as the vast majority the power ultimately is in their hands.
The ‘reason’ is explained by the science of biology and society. As humans like all species are biologically dependent on the biosphere, and therefore part of nature, when their survival is threatened by capitalism destroying that biosphere they will fight to the death to restore the balance between nature and society.
Today the majority of indigenous nations of Bolivia after a general strike of nearly two weeks are occupying the city of El Alto above La Paz to form a new independent government in opposition to the fascist regime which ousted Morales last year with the backing of the US.
https://www.facebook.com/374724603043709/videos/1041770946240416/?t=95
I don’t doubt your sincerity Bryan, and I agree all of us are important to society, it was why I’ve voted left all my life to this point.
But the left no longer believes that all are important.
It pursues a policy of identity politics, where only certain subgroups are virtuous and some are to be shunned and attacked.
Woe betide being old, white, male or a gun owner, or a farmer, or live rural.
Or have different ideas on anything the left decides : conservation, the economy, gangs, covid 19, or dare question the PM, the ultimate sin.
This is not an inclusive society but one being turned on itself by its current government.
> But the left no longer believes that all are important. It pursues a policy of identity politics, where only certain subgroups are virtuous and some are to be shunned and attacked.
Extermist distortions of identity politics are neither common to the left as a whole, nor exclusive to the left. There are just as many “SJWs” among centre-right neoliberals (eg the Hilerati and tech corporations in the US). In fact, it seems to me that the tunnel vision focus on identity issues has been a strategy for diverting the left away from campaigning against neoliberal political-economic orthodoxy. Blaming this on the left is part of the same strategy.
You confuse belief with confidence.
Rationalists deal in confidence. In the flight example, a rational thinker has high confidence of a safe flight, based on experience and data that indicates that the flight will be safe.
A belief is a conclusion arrived at in the absence of good evidence.
It’s a strange double standard of the meaning of belief isn’t it! In some contexts you believe something to be true if the evidence is overwhelming that it is true. But a “belief ” is something you hold to be true in the complete absence of evidence . It even implies a lack of evidence in it’s use.
We are strange creatures who think we are rational beings.
D J S
Yeah big business blames Covid 19 for the inevitable depression, but the blame doesnt wash when we can see that the pandemic itself was caused by the economic system itself. So capitalism facing a terminal decline causes global warming that causes ecological collapse including a pandemic that suddenly throws the global economy into depression.
No conspiracy involved. Just the fact that the tiny ruling class minority has the power to push the destructive effects of their failing system onto the working masses. That is why all around the world the masses are rising up against the effects of the system’s collapse and proving that as the vast majority the power ultimately is in their hands.
The ‘reason’ is explained by the science of biology and society. As humans like all species are biologically dependent on the biosphere, and therefore part of nature, when their survival is threatened by capitalism destroying that biosphere they will fight to the death to restore the balance between nature and society.
Today the majority of indigenous nations of Bolivia after a general strike of nearly two weeks are occupying the city of El Alto above La Paz to form a new independent government in opposition to the fascist regime which ousted Morales last year with the backing of the US.
https://www.facebook.com/374724603043709/videos/1041770946240416/?t=95
Yes dave.
It was the indigenous people of Cocabamba (spelling?) that blocked the main highway after the [corrupt] government sold the water system to an America company that, almost overnight, tripled water charges. They eventually brought down the government.
But fascism never sleeps. And where there’s a buck to be made, some arseholes will be there, cheating and lying and manipulating to get what they want: more for themselves and less for everyone else.
The fact is people DO CONSPIRE. They do it on golf courses, in pubs and restaurants, behind closed doors in local government buildings etc. Thus, the result of ‘public consultation’ is decided long before any ‘public consultation’ takes place, and for anything other than very minor matters public influence in ‘planning’ or ‘development’ is ZERO. The ‘public consultation’ process is simply a charade, designed to manufacture consent when often there isn’t any…. otherwise known as ramming it through against public opposition. We’ve witnessed it over and over again because there’s money to be made out of looting and polluting the environment and out of manipulating public policy.
I was alerted to a very important phenomenon by Derrick Jensen -Native American environmental activist and author of ‘Endgame’: if you are not incorporated into ‘the empire’ and if your food supply and way of life are dependent on the lakes, rivers and meadows of your local environment, you will defend them to the death; if you are incorporated into ‘the empire’ and if your food supply and way of life are dependent on ‘the empire’ you will defend ‘the empire’ to death.
Thus we witness the comments of defenders-of-the-empire on TDB; these ‘trolls’ (mostly National Party proponents of the loot-and-pollute economy) ridicule common sense because either they don’t have any, or because they choose not to use it since doing so would blow holes in their ridiculous arguments.
Covid can hopefully effect change for the better.
Such as better environmental controls and humane practises in food production, as an obvious one.
More alliances with other countries… saw this article, while I would hope NZ was more in line with the EU in terms of being a social democracy…. if we can’t get in with the EU…. then this is an idea….
United Kingdom should form ‘global superpower’ with New Zealand, Canada, Australia – historian
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2020/08/united-kingdom-should-form-global-superpower-with-new-zealand-canada-australia-historian.html
NZ needs to move away from supporting dictators and nations with poor human rights and environmental practises, for money…. China and US come to mind.