“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” –H. P. Lovecraft

We humans have an astounding need to know, even when we know nothing.

This has served us better than all lower order animals, including lawyers. Making sense of life, our community, our nations, our planet, and even the universe helps avoid many catastrophes or at least gets us through our day without the aid of medicated lobotomies.

Disorder in the Universe

A friend of mine is a computer expert, discusses science and technology, and believes the universe was created about six thousand years ago. When I said, “you obviously have a logical mind, so how come you believe this in the face of carbon dating and the Hubble Constant?”

He said, “The Bible gives me a framework for understanding the universe. If I ever find flaw with scripture, then the basis for how I deal with life evaporates. If the Bible says the universe is 6,000 years old, so it is for me.”

This is why beliefs are powerful and thus of interest to the propagandist and marketer. Beliefs are nearly indestructible because to dispose of a belief is to potentially inject chaos and havoc into your own world … and chaos is highly unpopular. Hence, getting someone to change their beliefs borders on impossible as it induces a sense of danger, because the vague and the undefined is perceived as dangerous.

But agreeing with someone else’s beliefs makes you a friend for life and might make them a warrior for your cause.

A key point is that beliefs are used as a substitute for knowledge, which oddly makes sense. Nobody can know everything about a single topic (though Giovanni Pico della Mirandola gave it a shot) much less know everything about everything. At best we can know a little about enough stuff, to get through the day alive.

But you have to know enough. Beliefs, unless dangerously wrong, suffice to avoid many perils. There may not be a God (nobody knows for certain) but believing in God and his/her/its set of rules for conducting yourself (i.e., don’t kill your neighbor or boink his wife) reduces the odds of calamity.

Another aspect is that beliefs are routinely representations of how things “should” be, not the way they actually are. Often, reality is disagreeable. We all thirst for a more perfect reality, though our individual ideals of perfection may be radically different. However we acquire beliefs, there is some tinge of desire involved.

Predictive Safety

We believe in vast arrays of things, based primarily on flimsy evidence. Often a good hunch paired with a single observation will create in someone’s all-to-supple mind a belief that they will carry to the grave. They do so in part because they create in the mind an explanation for one or more elements of life, and thus a guide to disaster avoidance.

Take political parties … please.

In the modern American political melee, both the major parties train their members to see evil and danger in the other party. They can do so by taking one datapoint, paring it with an event, claiming a cause/effect relationship, and thus plant a forever seed of opposition against an entire party and all its members.

The same plays out with economic ideologies (i.e., capitalism and communism), races, and music (my version of Hell is bluegrass influenced hip-hop).

Armed with a belief, one can make rapid decisions without much, if any, thinking (and neither the propagandists nor marketer want you to think too much – unsupervised thinking is unprofitable). In the wild, these assumptions are serviceable for escaping tigers. In the modern world, assuming it is dangerous to go to an ATM machine at 3AM is also a valuable belief. In this latter example, a person almost never knows the 3AM ATM mugging rate in their city, much less for a specific cash machine. But the generalized belief causes complex behaviors to avoid negative cash and blood flow.

Crowded Wisdom

“If a million people do a stupid thing, it is still a stupid thing.”

But most of the time those million people are not entirely stupid. If more than 51% of a group’s decisions avoid death, the tribe survives. In effect, group opinions are external, adoptable beliefs.

Group wisdom is a survival tool, and thus deeply ingrained in our DNA and our culture. Watch a school of fish as a shark approaches. The fish on the far side of the school do not see the shark, but they see the other fish rapidly moving in a new direction … so they move likewise. Fewer total fish get eaten by sharks that day.

People operate the same way. We rely on general consensus when we don’t have enough information (which is always) and most of the time crowd wisdom is a reliable option … until it isn’t.

There was a classic experiment where three actors and one test subject were put in a room to fill-out forms. While part way into their form-filling, non-lethal smoke was let into the room. The actors kept calmly filling in their forms. Only 10% of the test subjects got up, left the room and reported the smoke because the actor’s calm disinterest in the smoke led the test subjects to trust there was nothing to panic about.

When the room only had a test subject, 75% of them left the scene.

Belief systems are both created and reinforced by crowd wisdom. If you have three trusted friends who have a shared belief, odds are you will gravitate to their beliefs in part due to crowd wisdom. If those three friends in turn belong to the same political party, and share the general beliefs maintained within that party, you will too (even if you would otherwise find one or more of those beliefs to be purely nuts).

Indeed, “incremental inclusion”© is a form of unintended indoctrination. If you find comfort in a group for nine good reasons, your desire to be in the group may cause you to adopt the tenth, completely idiotic reason. Anyone who has studied American street gang culture understands that it is based on fraternity (not bad), meager but real opportunity (slinging drugs) and protection from neighborhood dangers (practical). All it takes is being willing to kill other people in other gangs for trivial reasons (quantifiably insane).

Excommunicated Aloneness

Excommunication, n. The involuntary expulsion of a heathen from an organization noted for holy wars and human sacrifices.

Adopting belief systems through any group (church, political party, street gang … what an interesting collection, eh?) includes “membership”. To belong to a group of any kind is a social dynamic that keeps the individual safe, physically, emotionally and spiritually. True loners, those who have no tribe, are so rare that we write books about them and make sure the authorities know who they are.

To be in a tribe, then booted from that tribe, is extremely painful. You lose all that safety, all that fraternity, all that security to wander the scary forests of independent thought. The risk of loss is so strong that people often weakly maintain beliefs they do not truly love in order to stay within the group.

I met-up with a center-left San Francisco Democrat friend once at a gathering of (almost) entirely center-left San Francisco Democrats. A speaker said something radically far-left, and the crowd cheered. Later, he confided he thought the statement was stupid, but he cheered anyway. When I chatted up another couple of people there, they said basically the same thing.

And the same happens in Dallas Republican circles too … I’ve seen it.

Group membership is such a strong motivator that even lukewarm adoption of all the beliefs within the tribe is a means for staying in the tribe. Even politely suggesting that one or another belief system is illogical or morally debased invites excommunication and the surrender of safety, fraternity and emotional interconnectedness.

It shows-up in colleges. Researchers at Northwestern University surveyed nearly 1,500 students to find if they masked their own beliefs in order to conform with campus orthodoxy. 88% said they did. These students were adaptive to an environment where peer belonging hinged on performative morality.¹88% self-censored on their beliefs surrounding gender identity, 72% on politics, 68% on family values, and 80% said they submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to agree with their professors

Resistance Grows with Superstition

A belief system based on believable superstitions can become a fortress. It works like this:

• Beliefs become a rubric for understanding life.
• This reduces uncertainty, which in turn reduces fear of the unknown.
• Challenges to a belief are more likely to cause a believer to add more walls because the costs of abandoning beliefs are too high, including:
  • The cost of leaving a tribe.
  • The cost of fear facing the unknown.
  • The cost of admitting to oneself they have been wrong.

 

In the political and social sphere, this is where culture wars are commonly fought. Many, maybe most, social conventions are built upon beliefs. Individually or collectively, these beliefs are often rooted in one or more believable superstitions. But to the believer, they are a consecrated truth that the believer subconsciously uses to make sense of their world. Any threats to the tenets of the belief are commonly resisted because to let go of the belief means no longer having an ordered life, or an ordered universe. The beliefs are posts in a fence surrounding their fortress, and people find safety, though few options or intellectual variety, within their fortress.

The problem for the believer is that often their beliefs are rooted in believable superstition, which in turn may be rooted in:

• Antiquated knowledge
• Ignorance (lack of knowledge)
• Prejudice (polluted knowledge)

 

And these are the common targets for propagandists, and occationally marketers.

Propagandists trade in both hope and fear, but mainly in fear. Any threat to a belief generates fear. Like marketers, propagandists identify widely held beliefs and tell those believers that the belief is being threatened. Again, threaten a belief and believers get defensive. Do it enough, and they go on the offensive.

Now, recall any time you tried to change somebody’s mind on any topic for which they had believable superstitions. As your conversation progressed, you likely saw the other person get tense. Your conversation mate may have brought up poorly connected non sequiturs. If you were gauche enough to continue your rhetorical assault on their beliefs, they might start getting angry and dismissive. Take it one more step and they could throw a right hook at your jaw.

Appealing to logic and data is prone to failure when discussing anything with a believer. Appealing to their other, higher-order beliefs … well, I get ahead of myself.

The fear additive

Let’s look fear in its beady little eyes.

Of the major emotions (fear, anger, sorrow, joy, love), fear is the most powerful because it is the one that alerts us to danger. Anger may give you some combative horsepower to fight a threat or even to fight your own fears. But fear alone is an instant safety reaction.

Which is why politicians and other liars prefer to use it.

There is a set of biological reactions to fear. When threatened, your adrenaline spikes. Adrenaline causes you to be more alert, but it can also cause you to make “more habitual responses than goal-directed choices.” In other words, fear eases you past critical thinking and into action.

No wonder politicians like using fear. It eliminates the danger of unsupervised voter thinking.

It also dovetails nicely with believable superstition. There is no boogeyman, with the possible exception of your quirky uncle. But the idea of a boogeyman is to a child’s mind both believable and triggers a fear-based response. The boogeyman is often a kids first believable superstition, and an effective if somewhat cruel parenting tool in order to keep kids from playing with dad’s chainsaw (“Don’t go in the shed. That’s where the boogeyman lives!”).

Along with all that adrenaline, fear also lifts your dopamine levels. Dopamine is the “feel good” drug your brain really, really, really likes. That sudden eye-crossing high you experience during an orgasm is a huge dopamine surge. That mild eye watering, grin-inducing high you get while eating spicy foods is also a dopamine fix.

So, fear makes you alert, makes you prone to instinctive response, and gives you a familiar buzz all at once. Exploiting an audience’s collective believable superstitions via fear is a dangerous vehicle for political action. This is the playground of propagandists. Though they occasionally appeal to other emotions beside fear, fear is their go-to for rallying mobs and storming bastilles.

It is also a fast path for selling security products from bomb shelters to handguns.

For the marketer, fear has a problem. It works for authentic dangers (works great for selling life  insurance) but not for consumer goods.

But tapping a believable superstition with positive emotions … that is the playground of marketers. An entire movie was based on the notion of openly stating the believable superstition to sell products, with the most vulgar ad copy for a high-dollar automobile reading “For men who’d like hand jobs from beautiful women they hardly know.”

 

But what does all this mean?

We discovered that:

• Facts are pointless for propagandists and marketers because they are too granular.
• Faith takes too much time but might be the long-term objective.
• Knowledge is serviceable but with “alternative facts”, most often “facts arguments” devolve into point-counterpoint spitting matches.
• That leaves beliefs, which are primarily emotional, and wherein any “knowledge” that targets a belief will be viewed as tenuous or outright false.
• The less knowledge supporting the belief, the more it slips into superstition.
• A believable superstition is the most susceptible to emotional prompting.
• Fear is the strongest prompt.
• Human biology amplifies the fear response via adrenaline and dopamine.