How Many Of Us Are Committed To Our Beliefs For The Wrong Reasons?
(Not exempting myself here.)
I just finished adding a bit to my previous post apologizing for some parts where I come across all condescending and self-righteous and, well, kind of a dick really. That was after thinking about exchanges I had earlier on Twitter about the Rittenhouse case, which led to me thinking about what I’d written about the case in that post, which led to me reconsidering whether everything I’d written there should have been written.
I’ve got a theory kind of related to that, and so this time I’m planning to get all introspective and philosophical and shit, if I can do that worth a damn. I’ve already said that if I could ever write as well as Matt Taibbi I’d feel pretty proud of that. But Caitlin Johnstone deserves another mention too, and I’m bringing her up because not only is she also a very good and informative writer, but she’s pretty good at analyzing the human race as well. If I can do that as well as her, ever, I’ll feel pretty proud of that too.
That’s actually part of what I want to talk about: pride. But bear with me as I go off on a little tangent first…
I’ve read most of the Dragonlance novels by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. They’re good books, and I recommend them, but I want to talk about two characters in particular, two of the more popular ones actually. Raistlin Majere and Caramon Majere.
I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum as I tell the basics of their story. These twin brothers were opposites; Caramon was physically strong, a skilled warrior, and kind-hearted. (Although maybe not quite as kind-hearted as you might think when you read the first trilogy. Keep on reading this post to see what I mean.) Raistlin, on the other hand, was very intelligent. Not that Caramon was a total dumbass or anything, but I’d say his intelligence was about average or slightly above. He wound up becoming a mage, and he could never be a warrior like Caramon because he was in poor health his entire life, and his health had only gotten worse by the time of the first trilogy.
Because of this, Caramon was always offering to help him. “Let me get that for you, Raist.” “It looks like you need some help Raist, I’ll take care of that.” “Are you sure you can climb down there like the rest of us, Raist? I can carry you…” (That one, as I recall, REALLY pissed Raistlin off.)
Raistlin couldn’t help but be bitter that his brother seemed to have gotten all the breaks both by having a reliable and healthy body and also by being a popular guy while Raistlin wasn’t very good socially and never really made friends.
What happens eventually is that Raistlin becomes more powerful and he takes off to attempt something big in the second trilogy of the series. He doesn’t need Caramon any more, and he doesn’t want Caramon around, so he just leaves. And Caramon is devastated by that rejection from the brother he spent his whole life looking out for. He starts drinking heavily. He lets himself go physically. His marriage is suffering because his wife can’t snap him out of this despair no matter what she tries.
But then something happens that requires Caramon to leave town on an adventure with one of his former adventuring buddies named Tasslehoff. And it’s during this journey that Tasslehoff—who is usually used as comic relief and is usually kind of scatter-brained—figures something out about the relationship between the brothers.
Tasslehoff gets mad and calls Caramon on the real reason he was always following Raistlin around and offering to do things to help him. Caramon did it because it made him, Caramon, feel good about himself. Perhaps just subsconsciously, but nevertheless, Caramon would help his brother out somehow and then he’d be able to feel proud of himself. Like on some level, he was thinking “I’m such a good and loving brother to Raistlin! Look at how helpful I just was! I’m a good person who did a good thing for my poor, helpless, lucky-to-have-me brother.”
At first Caramon is pissed too, but then he realizes that Tas is right. That really was the reason he helped Raistlin so much, and why he was so upset when Raistlin ditched him.
So…how many of us real life humans do you think are kind of like Caramon?
How many of us do you think pick an ideology and a side and stick with it not necessarily because it’s the right ideology or side (although it may very well be) but instead because we want to feel good about ourselves.
Like maybe some percentage of us on this planet are thinking “We’re such good people! We care about others, and we see who the villains are who need to be stopped, and we’re working so hard to stop them! We see who the good people are who need us to stick up for them, and so we stick up for them! We’re the good guys, and we are so proud of how good we are.”
As someone who considers himself a left-winger (although plenty of others have begged to differ recently), do I believe what I believe because it’s right, or because I think it’s right, or because I want to feel proud about being one of the good guys?
I know that pride, that ego, is a factor with me. If I say something like “Torture is never justified, ever, spare me your ticking time bomb scenario” I believe it, but I’d be lying to myself and everyone else if I said I took absolutely no pride whatsoever in being on the right side of the issue, instead of on the side that includes Bush, Cheney, the late and unlamented Donald Rumsfeld, etc.
I’m sure I’m not the only one like this. And if this is common, what does it mean when we are presented with evidence that actually, we aren’t on the right side? That we’re helping bad things to happen instead of good, that we’re helping bad people who’ve suckered us into thinking they deserve our loyalty?
That’s a hard pill to swallow, isn’t it? We don’t want to believe it if it’s true. We wish so hard for it to be untrue, for us to not have been dead wrong for such a long time.
We might get mad at the messenger bringing us this information. We might make excuses for the people we were unwise to believe in and/or support, as in “Okay, that thing they said was wrong, but maybe they weren’t lying. Maybe they just made a mistake.” Or “That thing they did was bad, but it could’ve been just an accident right?”
I can only speak for myself, but when that has happened to me it has never been easy. I used to think Democrats were trustworthy. After I realized they weren’t, I thought that TYT was trustworthy. When Cenk Uygur went full McCarthy I finally realized he wasn’t worth being a fan of…but hey, look at Kyle Kulinski over here arguing that RussiaGate’s bullshit, surely I can trust Kyle, he’s never steered me wrong before!
And so on. But with Kyle I wound up having a harder time than the others accepting the reality that he wasn’t helping after all. That, at best, he’s hopelessly naive and unwilling to accept the truth about the Squad because of his own pride in being a co-founder of Justice Democrats, and at worst he knows exactly what the Squad are and is knowingly running interference for them. It was more difficult, so it took me longer.
How many of the things we are certain about aren’t true after all? How often are we on the wrong side without realizing it? How much of the bad blood between us all is the result of us rejecting the unpleasant reality and substituting our own (to paraphrase Adam Savage) pleasant one where we’re actually correct and helping the world?
I wonder.
One thing that helps, is to stop caring about whether you're left, right, democrat, republican, or something else entirely. The lack of attachment to ideologies and focus on just trying to be intellectually honest and be right, even when that's HARD, does put a serious damper on that tendency.
It doesn't render you immune, but it makes you more self-critical, which obviously helps.