There is a continuum from fact to faith, and neither end of that spectrum is especially interesting to marketers or propagandists (the latter being malevolent marketers).

One problem we shaved apes confront is that we use every point between these extremes of fact and faith to make decisions, argue, escape harm, hold onto hope, and otherwise keep from resorting to drink while evading intellectual and emotional chaos.

On one end are facts, which are dull … tedious … picayune … sleep-inducing. Individually, facts are nearly useless. Reciting strings of facts will prevent you from being invited to cocktail parties or finding a mate. At best you will earn the company of other socially impaired homo sapiens.

Here is an example of why most facts, in isolation, are useless: It is a fact that an object will fall at an accelerated rate of 9.807 meters/second² … in a vacuum … at sea level … on the equator … of planet Earth … more or less around lunch time.

This fact is useless when deciding if you should cross a busy ten-lane highway … on planet Earth, more or less around rush hour.

On the other end of the spectrum is faith, which herein we define as:

faith, n., a belief with zero admissible evidence

Faith is the opposite of fact:

FACT	FAITH
Finite	Infinite
Discreet	All-inclusive
Evidence-based	Evidence-free

The commonality is that both extremes – fact and faith – are inarguable. Facts are inarguable because they are proven through repeatable experiments, such as dropping a feather in a vacuum (at sea level, on the equator …) over and over again and seeing little or no change variation of measurement.

Faith is inarguable because you cannot prove any of it. In the entire history of the human race, nobody has successfully proven or disproven the existence of God. Everybody from Sartre to the Pope is batting zero.

This is not to say facts or faith are undangerous. We humans can make a weapon out of anything and knowing a couple of facts (say gravitational acceleration and terminal velocity of an object dropped on a human body) does the job as well as convincing a few young men that God (whose existence has never been proven) wants them to fly planes into skyscrapers.

Though facts and faith are useful to scientists and theologians, they are near useless for marketers and propagandists. Marketing and political action is a volume business, and it is hard to get people to develop blind faith or stay awake reading data tables.

But the stuff in the middle … that’s interesting.

Facts

“That’s the fact, Jack!”

Well, most of the time.

Where many go wrong is calling knowledge a fact. Knowledge is perspective created by a collection of facts (more on this later). But a fact is a singular element.

There are some distinct features of facts which make their tiny isolation cumbersome.

A SINGLE FACT MEANS LITTLE: A fact by itself serves no purpose. It is only when they are collected together that something functional might, but not always, develop.

FACTS DON’T ALWAYS INTEROPERRATE: The velocity of a comet hurtling through space and the price of a steak sandwich will likely never appear on the same Venn diagram.

FACTS PROVIDE, AT BEST, ONE VIEWPOINT: Propagandist often talk about 40,000 “gun deaths” in America each year (perspective A) but don’t mention that 60% or more are suicides (perspective B) despite each datum being factual.

This is where many discussions collapse as one person cites a verifiable fact, while the other cites yet another verifiable fact. This makes both people “right” even if they are both wrong because of “perspective isolation” caused by describing a big issue through a tiny pinhole of data.

This is one reason neither propagandists nor marketers rely heavily on facts. The scope is too narrow to engage a lot of people and a singular fact is disinteresting. It also opens to instant retaliation for any sales pitch or political spin.

This is not to say the propagandist and marketers do not use facts to recruit believers and buyers. But they rarely lead with a fact, preferring to appeal first to the victim’s existing beliefs, then using facts to cement the listener to the proposed “solution”. In sales, it is called “selling the sizzle, not the steak”.

Where facts start to get interesting is when they lead to knowledge, which is more powerful than lonely facts, though less so than barely anchored beliefs.

Knowledge

Curiosity kills cats. Knowledge kills lions.

Knowledge is perspective created by a collection of facts.

This sounds blatantly obvious, but the ramifications are geometrically more complex than isolated facts.

For example, one fact is that tigers will attack and eat people. Another fact is that tigers prefer to hunt at night. Thus, the combination of these facts leads a meal-on-legs to understand the worst time to be wandering about the savannah is at night, because the odds of meeting a hungry tiger go way up.

Two facts, one abstraction (probability analysis) grants one very significant perspective. The tribe you never heard of failed to combine those two facts into usable knowledge whereas your ancestors did.

This feeds every subsequent topic, which oddly all have the same end goal. Knowledge, beliefs and faith are all means of trying to make sense of life.

We humans are odd … I could stop there. The statement is complete in and of itself. But we are unique in that our brains are fast correlation machines. We match observations to arrive at conclusions that aid in our survival and prosperity. No other animal does this nearly as well as we bipeds, and thus far plants have not stated an opinion nor discovered ways of avoiding becoming salad.

Small sets of facts lead to reasonably sound conclusions. Avoiding tigers at night was just the beginning. Noticing that portable food arrived at the watering hole around noon each day was another. Not grabbing a burning stick at the bright end proved viable. This mode of amalgamating data into knowledge extends all the way to today when you see a beautiful wreck of a woman in a dive bar and decide not to take her home (though the failure rate on this obvious danger is alarmingly high).

Larger collections of facts simultaneously lead to both more clarity and more confusion, and it depends largely on if the facts are hierarchical or parallel.

Before we dive deeper, it is important to realize that we upright apes are beings in the philosophical sense … and if you enjoy verbal fisticuffs, get any three academic philosophers in a room and ask, “what is being”. You will receive 27 contradictory answers.

For now, accept that any being is the sum of all their perceptions. These perceptions include biological senses, personal experiences, self-awareness, thoughts, indoctrination, instinct, time and a bunch of other assaults on you. We are all different because no two people share the same set of perceptions.

Domino facts, vertical and horizontal

Most technology are facts in hierarchical structures. The modern cellphone is a quite sophisticated, AI capable, Internet connected computer … that can also make telephone calls. The layers of the sundry facts – chemistry, mineralogy, electricity, programming – that led to this are insanely deep (says this former mainframe guru). Each was additive to predecessor knowledge and the final product could not exist without all of them.

But other sets of facts – concerning the sex life of Brazilian tree frogs or about horizon event phenomena around black holes – are not, at present, additive. Lock a zoologist and a theoretical physicist in a room for a decade and no nifty products will be developed, much less marketed and sold.

This mirrors where many social and political debates devolve into dead ends. The realist will say that the current federal debt is unsustainable (based on his set of facts and calculations) while the socialist will claim the debt can and should grow (based on his set of suspect facts and miscalculations). In isolation, any set of facts assembled to create “knowledge” will be completely foreign and impossible to believe to someone else.

We’ll also note that knowledge is like a balloon. Insufficiently filled, they are limp and flabby. Well filled, they are beautiful and fun to play with. That said, a deflated scope of knowledge which grants a limited perspective is not a hindrance to having inflated opinions, as evidenced every second on Twitter/X. And people with well inflated scopes of knowledge frustrate those with limited knowledge by pontificating ad nauseum.

The belabored point is that facts are discreet while knowledge can range from being no better than raw facts or come close to being perfect perspective. Interestingly, the people with the greatest amount of knowledge on a topic often decline to state perspective with certainty. Ask an expert what they think about a topic, and they are likely to reply, “Well, let me tell you what we know so far ….”. They have learned that they have not learned everything.

It gets even worse when people with beliefs attempt to find sets of knowledge – or worse yet, make it up – to defend their perspective without the benefit of broad and/or deep investigation.

Beliefs

“I believe I’ll have another drink.”

Beliefs are perspectives with limited knowledge.

No, I am not talking in circles. Knowledge is a set of facts that grant a limited perspective. Beliefs are larger perspectives with limited knowledge. The transition from knowledge to beliefs is where we drift from what we narrowly know to be true into what we want to be true. Beliefs are the landscape of philosophy and ideology – which combined is often politics.

And it gets worse the more one moves away from knowledge and wades into superstition.

Where this all confounds mankind is that:

• Isolated facts are indisputable.
• Limited knowledge is often debatable.
• Beliefs are beyond debate because they are not anchored in broad knowledge.

 

Limited knowledge might lead to forming a belief, but this is not a given. However, a belief supported by limited knowledge is, in the mind of a believer, is cold, hard truth. Stated differently, you can believe with little supporting knowledge, and you can have supporting knowledge without believing.

And that is why beliefs are powerful and often dangerous. To have a perspective that is poorly supported by knowledge means the person is willing to believe their perspective without factual basis. This is not to say a belief lacking substantial support is wrong. It could be 100% correct. But the believer is untroubled by minimal evidence and is highly resistant (for reasons we’ll explain later) to amending their beliefs.

It is because ardent attachment to a belief-based perspective is strong and approachable that propagandists and marketers prefer to exploit beliefs as their point of attack.

Belief systems are a collection of one-off beliefs, and these are even more intransient than isolated, singular beliefs. One can believe sharing is good (true per our beliefs) and cascade this into believing that conscripted sharing – ala communism – is also good (not what we believe). To get from sharing to communism requires an interlocking set of related beliefs (i.e., we should share, but some people don’t, those greedy bastards are capitalists, all capitalists are inherently evil because they don’t share, thus we have to take everything from everybody in order to achieve “true” sharing).

But beliefs are also a commitment, and that is where they become problematic.

Faith

faith, n. Perfect understanding paired with perfect ignorance.

We define faith as belief with zero proof. No facts, no knowledge. To believe in the unseeable, the unmeasurable, the unknowable is faith … and thus typically the domain of religion and too often the religions of politics.

Here is my favorite statement for disturbing nearly everyone: In the entire history of mankind, nobody has successfully proven or disproven the existence of God.

That is a factual statement about both religion and atheism. About enlightenment and endarkenment. About what we wish was true and what we cannot know.

Faith is almost never of interest to propagandists and marketers aside from exploiting existing faith for sales or political gain. Creating faith is never easy, fast or cheap and both the propagandist and marketer are lazy, in a hurry, and on a budget. That said, once faith is widespread, it can be used to recruit armies, missionaries, and get out the vote.

Faith requires a mind that can conceptualize abstracts, which is perhaps why no other animals have formed churches. God is a concept, regardless of if he/she/it exists or not. Nobody has yet to measure God, find his home address, take a picture of the Almighty, or spammed God’s email. But the human mind, such as it is, can conceptualize a being that cannot be seen or touched, and ascribe to it personality traits … many undesirable.

This is where beliefs and faith are divided. Beliefs are tenuously anchored in the real world. Anyone who has not been in a serious automobile accident, but who has watched one, believes that it is dangerous because they have observed painful physics from a safe distance. They have solid facts evidenced by twisted metal and a very worried looking EMT.

It is a small step from “bonking my head hurts, so a head-on collision must hurt a lot”. Contrarywise, it is a giant leap from “the stars in the sky had to have been created somehow, and I’m not smart enough to pull that off myself, so someone really smart – I’ll call him ‘God’ – must have made them.” The former has a seed of experiential evidence (a knot on their noggin), the latter has no evidence at all.

As an aside, the detachment from any personal real-world perception is why religion needs routine and ritual (and also why some people who are uncomfortable with new things consecrate their personal routines and rituals). Formalization of faith creates an appearance of the authority of God, and rituals allows groups of people to add community authority. Without ritual, religion might die on the cross of skeptical logic.

Emotional Fellow Traveler on the Continuum

emotion, n. A prostrating disease caused by a determination of the heart over the head. It is sometimes accompanied by a copious discharge of hydrated chloride of sodium from the eyes.

Emotions are innate in most mammals, including us humans. Even house cats display emotion … when it suits them.

Emotions are a set of serviceable survival traits. Take love and fear. If we did not love our children, we might be tempted to strangle them at birth to avoid the wreckage wrought by toddlers or them becoming [gasp] insufferable teenagers. Likewise, fear keeps us from being eaten by lions, voting for dictators or not overreacting when looking down the business end of a gun.

Interestingly, the more knowledge a person has, the less important emotions become, just as the more competent a person is, the less afraid of failure they are. And that is why beliefs and most importantly believable superstitions are the playground of marketers and propagandists.

Emotions have always played havoc with human operations. The reason is that emotions are valuable to basic survival. Fear, love, anger, sorrow … they keep us from danger, either overt (i.e., getting eaten by tigers) or through mutual advancement (i.e., love, marriage, children, community, family, etc).

We’ll circle back to this after we dive into why beliefs, and thus believable superstitions, are so powerful. For now, accept (believe) that millions of years of evolution have made hominids with emotions more resilient and thus more likely to live long enough to make more hominids.

The Continuum Contrasts

Edington’s Law of Research: The number of theories established to explain any phenomenon is inversely proportional to the available knowledge (also known as the Theological law).

What makes the continuum from fact to faith difficult to navigate is that each segment is on a broad spectrum, and the spectrum across each is even more so.

This is in part because there are three general traits that define the anchor points for both of the extremes.

On the “fact” side of the spectrum things tend to deal with lifeless data, viewed without emotional investment and perhaps a little philosophical analysis. Conversely, on the opposite faith end of the range, there is an abundance of emotionally laden abstractions that may be little more than unbridled superstition.

But there is no black or white in either the extremes, and nothing but a rainbow of variations betwixt the extremes in the knowledge and belief realms. A great deal of human misunderstanding and resulting misery comes from everyone being on different vertical and horizontal positions therein.

Though out of favor these days, the whole left/right brain theory is a good analogy on this point (people like me, who are “cross-dominant”, equally left/right brained, are the ones who frustrate everybody else). Left-brained people, as legend claims, would inhabit the left side of this diagram, they being more logical, orderly and mathematical. Right-brained people, supposedly more creative, visual, spatial and abstract would populate the right.

The point is that marketers and propagandists want to find people who are in the belief region and can tailor their messaging to any or all of these three traits in order to securely bind the consumer to the pitch.