Public belief

All politics lies downstream of the psyche of individuals — individual thoughts, decisions, and reactions are the building block of all political behavior. The great bulk of political analysis attempts to omit, elide, or reduce away this inconvenient fact. Political commentary would almost always rather talk about things about happening in the real world: the economy, public policy, or real events like elections, disasters, conflicts. The linkage between the real world and individual belief is treated as straightforward and not worth mentioning. Unfortunately, if we want to understand political outcomes, there is little reason to assume this is correct.

Our minds are guided by belief. Those beliefs can be correct or incorrect.

We get our beliefs from many places, but a lot of them — I would argue the bulk of them — seem to come from hearing beliefs from other people. This is almost logically necessary, because individual human beings directly experience very little of the world and must learn of the rest through communication. Thus, we believe things we are told by other people that we trust. We believe things that most of our acquaintances believe, in order to fit in with the crowd. We tend to assume that beliefs held as a consensus in our community are — must be — true.

But there is no reason to assume there is an real connection between the number of people holding a belief and whether or not that belief is true. After all, the source of most beliefs is simply “other people.”

The category of “things people believe” can include subjective ideas, what we might consider ideological principles. But it also includes claims about the nature of the world that are not subjective, like the number of crimes that are being committed in the United States, or how many immigrants exist, or whether or not the economy has high unemployment. To the individual, there is no clear distinction between a subjective and objective fact, they all simply go into the pile of premises that construct a mind.

Nothing above seems controversial, but the implications are alarming. It suggests that many people can be made to believe almost anything, by hearing it enough from voices they respect, or seeing it regarded as the consensus in their intellectual community. It suggests that there are no firm guardrails on public belief — no point where individuals can be relied on to stop and say “Hasn’t this gone too far? Isn’t this too divergent from my real experience? This cannot be true.” It suggests that if the correct social forces align, the bulk of humanity can be convinced of false, easily disproven, even insane ideas, simply by the power of social transmission.

This is alarming, but is it wrong? Isn’t history full of examples of precisely this? Societies adopting false, dangerous, even suicidal beliefs en masse? Wildly false claims or ideas circulating for centuries?

It would be comforting to know that the range of political outcomes is sharply constrained, or even mechanically lashed to, a handful of measurable on-the-ground indicators. You could look at a country and say “There is no way this country could fall into fascism, because it is one of the richest places on earth and is rapidly growing more prosperous. All is well so the people’s political beliefs will remain stable.”

In a world where public belief roams free, uncabined by reality, we can make no such guarantees. The range of potential political outcomes is much wider than we can imagine or predict. Political outcomes are limited only by what the infrastructure of information and social communication will permit. The more that false and dangerous beliefs are able to circulate widely within that infrastructure, the greater purchase they can achieve on the public mind. There is no other limitation. And there are many avenues through which false and dangerous beliefs can travel through the public.

But I think that’s the world we live in.