The Lie That Made The West

[audio available here courtesy of AskWho]

The Core of Civilization

In Children Believe Every Lie I wrote about Aspirational “Believing In” versus True Belief. To recap: Many beliefs are aspirational and everyone knows that saying “I believe this thing” really means “it would be good if this was true, and acting like it is true will help to get us there, so we’re all going to pretend it is (as much as possible) in order to make that happen.” Children (and autists) don’t “Get The Joke” — they observe everyone proclaiming an aspirational belief but don’t know that it’s aspirational, and so they believe it is actually true. Having a world model this deeply wrong can have devastating consequences. It also engenders deep antipathy in adults who later discover it was never true.

There is an Aspirational Belief that is core to liberal western civilization. Almost everyone in the modern west proclaims unswerving belief in it. It is true that the world would be better if it was true, and that investing resources into the belief will have significant benefits for society. It is so important that a cornerstone document of the seminal government of the modern world declares this belief to be the justification for our society! It is the first casus belli given, and is described as self-evident.

It is also ridiculously blatantly false upon even the most casual investigation. Yet I managed to avoid realizing this until I was in my 30s, and it took a comical level of evidence to break me out of it. Perhaps because I want it to be true, and I want to act as if it is. Perhaps because it’s hard to deny the reality we are presented. I am one of the 56%.

I speak, of course, of the lie that All Men Are Created Equal.

I believed this to the point of honestly thinking that the Women’s World Cup Controversy could be resolved by having the mens and womens teams play each other.

The Fallout of False Belief

This isn’t just about sports or physical capabilities. That’s trivial compared to the actual effects of fully believing everyone is the same.

If everyone is basically the same, aside from some superficial differences we can and should basically ignore, that means modeling any and every human is trivially easy. All you need to do is place yourself in their shoes and think “what would I do?” Because we’re not so different, you and I. Hell, we’re basically the same person.

Deep belief that All Men Are Created Equal results in an alchemically-pure, weapons-grade distillation of The Typical Mind Fallacy. Imagine Truman living in a world of comprehensible, sensible humans… except actually nearly everyone is an alien imposter from one of a thousand dimensions and Truman has NO IDEA this is true. How deranged would his experience of life be?

At least 10% more deranged

1. If I want to attract a mate of the opposite sex, I interrogate what I find desirable. Then I try to act this way. I am completely flummoxed when this fails to draw a mate. I later discover that what women are attracted to is completely different from what I’m attracted to! No one told me this. Indeed, they literally told me the exact opposite.¹ This feels like intentional sabotage in what is perhaps the most important thing most people will set out to do! And the primary lesson I then took away from this (which I’m still working to unlearn to this day) is that women want a performance. The only way to not die unwanted and alone is to get very good at performing… and never let the performance mask slip for even a minute.

2. I had no use for religion. Anyone who thinks that religion is net-positive was obviously a victim of religious brainwashing. It was my duty to help them break free.
   Turns out, people aren’t all like me. Some people really do need a religion. To the point that I think I harmed some people by assaulting their faith. A friend of mine convinced her mother that god doesn’t exist and religion is false, and now believes she made her mother’s life worse by doing so.
   If the New Atheists had realized how much people need religion, I think we would have done things differently. The mass discrediting of the old religions left a religion-vacuum. Rather than seeing people freed from religion we saw many drown for years, then finally create a new modern religion to supplant the old one.² An inkling that people are very different could have prevented this. At the very least this result would have been thinkable, and therefore addressable.

3. I saw allies where none existed. When the progressive coalition worked on issues of equality, I had assumed it was because we all believed that all of us were equal in a deeply literal sense, and we were all motivated by that. The first time a subgroup of the coalition disagreed with one of the equality measures being advanced (specifically, black voters in California re gay marriage) I felt a sense of betrayal so profound it still stings today. I had no model for the type of person who believed different groups of humans would be served better with different rules, but would team up with someone like me for select issues. I had thought that the belief that everyone is the same was a uniting factor of all good people. Now I had to accept that either this isn’t true, or that I had been allied with bad people for the practicalities of winning certain battles. Funny thing is I believed the latter until recently, since that seemed more palatable than accepting we are fundamentally not all equal.

4. It occurs to me as I write this that maybe the belief we’re all equal is one reason for the intense alienation so many people feel in the modern world. We all expect to find other minds fundamentally like our own, and we treat all other persons as such. They aren’t, so this fails. We’re startled that our attempts at something as simple as connection fail so dramatically and consistently. Constant unexplainable failure to connect will make you feel utterly alone. It certainly does for me, at any rate. I had no idea it was because I was expecting the wrong thing, and that other people are fundamentally different. It’s not a constant rejection, it’s just that stepping into an inferential chasm without building up a spanning bridge will never work. And I couldn’t see the chasm at all.

These examples may sound crazy, but that’s exactly the point. Just like truly believing God literally exists changes every single ramification of existence on Earth, so does truly believing we have no substantial difference.

Perhaps It Is Necessary

As an aspirational belief, it seems All Men Are Created Equal pays huge dividends. It allows everyone to shoot for the stars, trying to reach their highest potential. It drains away prejudice and distrust, the mud-bogs of cooperative societies. It provides a system of justice that maximizes growth and let’s nerds keep their lunch money.

Perhaps more importantly, it provides a firm bulwark against the idea that it’s acceptable to enslave, exploit, or collectively punish a group of people. They’re all like us. There is no excuse.

It seems that most people don’t have firm principles. They have beliefs, and those beliefs motivate their actions. Not principles. The only way to run a society on principles is for such people to hold beliefs that (if true) would approximate those principles. All Men Are Created Equal is one such belief. It is a lie that is necessary for the belief-motivated to behave in a principled fashion.³

I want to believe that everyone can understand that aspirational beliefs are good, and that acknowledging them as aspirational rather that literal truth makes no difference. That everyone has the ability to understand and decouple these things. That we can get all the good parts of this belief without deranging the lives of those who truly believe it and forcing everyone else into hypocrisy. But that would be (once again!) committing the Typical Mind Fallacy. “If I can understand this, why can’t everyone?” We are not all basically the same as me. You don’t have infinite words to bridge distances when dealing with large groups. In fact, once you’re trying to coordinate many thousands of people, you only have About Five Words.

All (1) Men (2) Are (3) Created (4) Equal (5)

And Yet

And yet it feels like I am still thinking in the frame that everyone is the same. Because if I really accept that people are very, strikingly different, that means different solutions apply to different folks. What works extremely well for one group is actively harmful to another.

This doesn’t stop being true when it’s about me.

Spreading the belief All Men Are Created Equal is good for society overall, but it is harmful for those who believe things deeply and take things literally. It is harmful to us while we believe it, and it is harmful to society when we learn it’s not true and we actually can’t trust anything anyone says. So I don’t have to sacrifice the interests of myself and those like me on the altar of Everyone Else Needs This. We are different. We, as a society, can do more than one thing.

Many (most?) groups should say All Men Are Created Equal loudly and without further complication. Groups of people like me should stress that humans are different, so much more different than one can imagine at first. It is because we are so different that this slogan is so important for humanity—we may not understand it, but they need it, and therefore having it is good. It’s what built the modern world, it’s why we have the ability to serve our own community in this way. We wouldn’t have the freedom to be different if that belief didn’t give everyone that excuse to treat us all well. So, uphold it. Remember why it’s important. And always remember it is nothing close to literally true.

1. Realizing how different women are is shocking after decades of not realizing they’re different. It’s like dating a different species.

2. In this post I said “I plan to write more about this Lie and my relationship to it in a future post.” …over two years ago. It took me a long time to get to here.

3. This may be the steelman behind all of religion, in fact. And is directly tied to my earlier Point #2 that Some People Need Religion For Reals.