Day 1462 – On Fantasy, Reality, and Belief

Sunday January 10, 2021 ( Electoral College Certification Day -4, 

                                           Insurrection Day -4,

                                          Georgia Senate Election  -5 )

Election Day -68

10 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

What we think we know derives from two sources: Grandma and Einstein. 

In other words from a moral authority (Grandma, our parents, teachers, priests, politicians, and historians) or science (that which we can verify via observation and experiment).

I would posit that all of culture and civilization is founded on the crap that Granda (sic our parental authority) told us as kids. When you get right down to it what is civilization except the passing down of stories and traditions? Progress is the pushing back of our own ignorance by scientific experiment.

Science is the relentless pursuit of what is real. I could have said “truth” but that has a certain moral tone to it nowadays.

Religion is the group held belief in something that is based usually on some unprovable assertion. There are two kinds of facts: historical and provable (or scientific.)

If an event happens (say someone gets shot) you can’t go back and repeat the experiment. You have to depend on what people say they saw or you have to collect evidence that provide clues to what happened. You can draw conclusions from these two sources: what is said/believed and what evidence there is (ie Science) (“Susie says, ‘Tom shot Mary.’ ” , After having collected cartridge casings, bullets shot, and powder burns on Susie’s hand, plus the fact that it was Susie’s gun and Tom was not in the house where Mary was shot you conclude that Susie is lying and that she in fact shot Mary. )

Religion is what is believed. It is generally based on stories that back up a set of notions (myths – Civilization is based on myth. The collective beliefs of a group of people. Those myths are passed down by parental or religious or political authority. ie Grandma )

If you are Christian you are asked to believe that Christ is the son of god and that he was killed, came back from the dead and then rose to heaven. The fact that no one can find heaven up there in space is a problem for the more scientifically minded.

If you are Muslim you are asked to believe that your prophet, Muhammed, got on a winged horse and flew from one place to another. The fact that no evidence has ever been found of a winged horse ever existing is a problem to the scientifically minded. Add to that that the life of Muhammed is well documented. In fact, it’s too well documented. Just like Hunter S. Thompson once was forced to admit that he could not have done all the drugs he claims to have done and survived; Muhammed could not have  said all that is claimed, been all the places or done all the things written. Islamic Law is basically scholars arguing over who, based on their scriptures, has the better claim as to what the prophet actually did or said. You can’t go back and find out. There is no video tape, no instant replay.

The three major religions of western civilization are based on one god, the god of Abraham. There is disagreement on details.

I contend that religions change based on fact, the advancement of knowledge changes what is believed, because people will no longer accept the same line of bull when it is patently shown to be false. In that case, the moral authorities have to change there line of bull. Sorry grandma.

When Galileo said he saw moons around Jupiter the Vatican refused to believe it. He said to them all they had to do was look through his telescope. They refused. Who wants to be shown that your beliefs are false? Copernicus concluded that the planets and therefore Earth traveled around the Sun. This was based on the realization that the orbits of the planets were easier to describe and understand if this were true, despite the fact that the observed data could fit either a heliocentric or Earth centric model. He was at a lose to describe the eight year elliptical orbit of Mars because he thought all orbits were circles, not ellipses as they really are. This, based on the notion that god had made a perfect world and planets would be perfect spheres and would move in perfect circles. The reality was different than the belief, and when belief runs into reality it can be an ugly transition.

We are dependent on the word of others because we don’t have time to carry out tests or experiments on everything that we could. We have to depend on others. Hence the phrase, “Resting on the shoulders of giants” (or those who came before.) In science, we can rerun the experiment. In history, we can not. 

“Did anyone see Jesus rise?”

“What about Muhammed and that winged horse?”

No? “You gotta believe!”

(Uh, sorry. Kind of hard to do. Ya know?)

If someone is trying to get you to believe something that you see with your own eyes is untrue it’s called “gaslighting.” Based on the movie (“Gaslight” (UK) or “Angel Street” (USA) ) where a husband was trying to drive his wife crazy by fiddling with the gaslights in the house and telling her it wasn’t happening and she was going crazy.

We’ve experienced a lot of gaslighting politically in the past four or five years. Many have fallen for it. (Ie Lincoln’s famous “You can fool some of the people all of the time.”) For those who have fallen for it, they have done so in many cases because what they are told aligns with what they want or are predisposed to believe. 

Social media has allowed folks to find their tribe, and by that we have come to realize that those tribes are people who hold the same beliefs, interests, and prejudices.

This gets to the issue and idea of prejudice and discrimination. Both those terms can be used pejoratively or positively. You can say that you have discriminating taste for instance and that suggests you appreciate quality or the finer things in life. However, you can also say you hate XYZ people and that is prejudice. The law says nothing about being prejudiced. It has a lot to say about if you act on that prejudice. Acting on prejudice is discrimination. 

Can you legislate morality? Many say no, but in fact the answer is yes. If you pass laws that forbids certain kinds of behaviors you can legislate what people do and that affects their beliefs. When I was in India last year I never saw anyone smoking. I asked why that was and found out that it is against the law to smoke in public. Do you think that effects things? You bet it does.

But let’s say you are told something over and over again. Advertising executives will tell you that it takes eight exposures to something for you to believe it is true, even if it isn’t. Advertising is rift with lies that we believed at one time:

– Radium treatments were good for you,

– Smoking was healthy,

– Cocaine? Heroin? Bloodletting? All good.

– Tonics, snake oil, crystals – natch.

What about religion? I leave it to the student at lab time, except for this one little story from my life. When my kids were little my wife, a Roman Catholic, and I, an Episcopalian – also Catholic btw, went “church shopping.” We were leaving a Roman Catholic church and the priest, a fellow with a marvelous Irish accent, was telling a story about one of the children in Sunday school that day. They had been talking about Easter. How Jesus had been crucified and rose from the dead three days later to rise to heaven. This kid, a very rambunctious lad, had not been paying attention to most of the lesson. We woke up when they got to the part of the back from the dead part. He found great exception to that idea and expressed it vehemently. “Uh uh, no. When you dead, you dead!” And he apparently went on for quite a bit, the priest unable to stop him.

In recounting the story the priest was laughingly recounting what had happened and the others were tacitly going along, but I denoted an undercurrent of – what would you call it? – Like “Maybe the kid has something here?” or what we might say “The king has no clothes!” syndrome? I mean, who has the better case if this were to go to debate? The priest or the kid? It’s not even close. But you are being asked to believe. Gaslighting with moral religious authority.

What happens when those fantasies run into reality? What would have happened had that Cardinal in the Vatican looked through Galilee’s telescope? He would have seen reality. He could call it god’s work if he liked, but how could he then justify that with what he had believed?

What happened when the Trump supporters were told to go to the Capital and do various things? You can use whatever verb you like, but the point is they were told to do something, something violent, and they did. They had been gaslighted for days, weeks, months, years by Trump, but that is not all. Their own beliefs had been stoked for years by a pattern of prejudice. I remember when I watched the movie “Shoah,” a nine hour long documentary interviewing people who had experienced and participated in the Holocaust, a Jewish scholar pointed out that the prejudice agains the Jews in Europe had been there for 700 to 800 years. Most of what Hitler said was well known and accepted as true. What he did was to okay and therefore implement “the final solution,” but the rest? Well, that rested on the shoulders of those who came before him.

Much of what Trump had been telling his people was believed before he came on the scene. He merely amplified and reinforced it.

The people who marched on the Capital were a mixed bag of various prejudices. There were anti-Semites, Q-anon supporters, reality game folks, racists, people who actually believed the election had been stolen and they were there to right the wrong, anarchists, Second Amendment right believers – you name it. There were all kinds of unproven, disproven, and prejudiced believers in that mob.

Behind the racist, anti-Semitic sweat shirts, the cos-playing dress up folks there was also a contingent of well-organized military and police trained people. It has come to light that they had zip-tie handcuffs, ear piece headphones and a layout of the capital. They were looking for people and they knew exactly where to look. Was it an inside job? Well, that depends on what “inside” means in this case.

Here’s what is emerging as facts:

– The Capital Building was breached by a large group of people,

– The Capital Police were outnumbered 10 to 1 or better,

– They had not been instructed by their superiors that this day would be unusual,

– They thought the protest or demonstration would be like many others,

– They were not instructed to bring their gas-masks,

– They could not reach their superiors when trouble erupted, in fact their superiors were noticeably absent

– While we saw pictures of cos-play and re-enactors their was fighting going on, hand to hand fighting. It went on for five to six hours. Those officers were seen lying in the capital cafeteria after it was over exhausted. Some were crying because they saw images of some of their white counterparts letting the protestors in and taking selfies with them.

– The black Capital policemen were called “nigger” repeatedly that day.

– The Pentagon, which apparently has to authorize the use of the National Guard on Federal property, did not respond to pleas and phone calls for authorization. It was ninety minutes in one case before an informal call came to the governor of Maryland to okay sending in his troops.

– The Mayor of DC had asked for the National Guard but I have not seen that they got activated. Not sure who activates in that case. DC only has control of the streets, not the Federal buildings.

While some on the right are trying to say it wasn’t them that it was anti-fa etc. There is no evidence of that. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary. This was a build up that had been talked about on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for months. One of the Proud Boys boasted about putting a bullet through the head of Nancy Pelosi. 

There is a picture of a man in the Capital chamber with zip-ties. He’s a trained airforce man. He claims, “he just picked them up.” Whether you believe him or not (I don’t) it is obvious that someone had come with the idea of handcuffing people and taking hostages. This wasn’t a fun in the sun effort. This was a planned criminal enterprise. It was egged on by the president, his family, friends, associates, and various hate groups and their supporters and lieutenants.

It is a case of prejudice turning into discrimination and into criminal activity.

It is a case of fantasy and belief meeting reality.

And yet, after all that, Republican member of the House and the Senate still sided with The Big Lie that there was a problem with the Electoral College. Here they are: