Myths & Reality.

"To die, to sleep. To sleep perchance to dream: Ay, there’s the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come” ~ Hamlet (by William Shakespeare)

The more I am interacting with people who insist that:

Patanjali's 100% Covid19 cure must be given the benefit of doubt and tested before its claims are discarded,

I should be more open minded about things if I am to call myself a rationalist, and

I only hate Patanjali because it uses ancient Indian traditional knowledge, which Big Pharma are trying to suppress for years,

the more I am convinced that the Venn diagram of these people and those who fall for 419 Nigerian scams is one big circle.

Also, these people are most likely to believe a WhatsApp forward and propagate it without another thought as long as it appeals to their prejudices and deeply held beliefs.

Don't get me wrong. It isn't that there is a special group of unusually foolish, easily duped, highly impressionable people and that somehow its members keep bumping into me all the time. Many of them, nay, all of them are academically educated, well-travelled, well-read, moderately successful in living healthy, prosperous, happy lives, and do not consider themselves to possess more than the usual levels of stupid as compared to their friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances. They are also productive members of the society and are in fact the ones that make the wheels of this nation move. In short, they are your neighbours, classmates, aunts, and peers who are bankers and bakers, entrepreneurs and engineers, doctors and dressmakers, pilots and poets, soldiers and software wizards, even scientists and teachers.

With just one small difference: They are all adults, meaning that their views about life, the universe, and everything have solidified to the point of ossification, over a period of time so long that they have forgotten what it is like not to hold the views they hold, or even that there is a possibility of an alternate view. They cling to this and build their life's mythology, based on which they continue to go about their day. Anything that appeals to this mythology seems prima facie to also coincidentally be something that appeals to their intellect. They mistake this selection bias for reasoned justification. Then, they act on it, most times with zero consequences to themselves or the others who are affected by that decision, but sometimes, with disastrous results, which even after knowing the disaster that has flowed from their decisions, which come from their long and deeply held self-generated mythology that guides their life, does not allow them to introspect or rethink that very mythology that has caused the mayhem they can clearly see, even as it corrodes the very life that mythology was supposed to support: their own. The repercussions of this are, of course, felt by every other life their life is connected to, and other second, third, and fourth order consequences of their actions based on the ideas they so fondly believe are rooted in reality. And that is when it becomes necessary to comment on it, and to hold up a mirror.

Long ago, I wrote about this very same subject, which I have shared at least half a dozen times since. I share it here again, because it is relevant to this discussion too.

So, do I think I have (or have developed over time) some kind of a super-sensitive #woodar (a woo RADAR) that detects bullshit faster and with less information than others? Or do I believe that these naïve folks who put their trust in anything printed on paper/screen or spoken on air (with a massive selection bias) are exceptionally gullible?

Frankly, no. It is just that the creators of content needing a willing suspension of disbelief create such content with a clever built-in filter that makes this content literally invisible to those who can debunk it while amplifying it to those who already believe, or desperately want to believe, in it even before they stumbled upon this content created specifically to exploit those very a priori beliefs they have always held. And good propagandists, like good scamsters and charlatans, know this better than you would give them credit(?) for.

To such credulous people, the truth does not matter, since they are not open to building their myths based on reality, but in fact, the other way around. And anyone exposing their myths by contrasting them with reality is their enemy because they make them uncomfortable and, frankly, embarrassed and inferior, all for beliefs and ideas they have always (or at least for a very long time) held deeply and presumed to be true.

On the other hand, anyone who can dial into those very myths and align themselves with them, even if superficially, can become not just an ally, but a thought leader, gaining control over and manipulating those myths to suit their purpose and intent, honourable or otherwise.

Coming back to Indian politics (a subject I have danced around but avoided speaking of in this post), the reason a Gandhi is a Mahatma, or a Babasaheb is a saviour, or a Netaji is a hero to so many is because they all figured this out and exploited that superpower to get what they wanted by making people believe what they wanted these people to believe, and then making them do what they wanted them to do. Just like today's politicians. Except what they wanted the people to think or do was vastly different than what today's politicians want.

And therein, as the bard said, lies the rub!