Witold Piecki was already a war hero before he decided
to sneak into Auschwitz—the only man to ever voluntarily enter a prison camp.
His purpose was to liberate the people.
“Hope,” writes Hanson, “is to strike a match to light
up a void. To show us the possibility of a better world—not a better world we want to exist, but a world we didn’t
know could exist.”
(His book: Everything is F*cked, -A Book About Hope.)
Holy Moly, I started to write about Why Smart People Believe
Stupid Things and found Piecki’s story. Some people minimalize the death camps—thinking
they didn’t exist, or think that the number of people murdered was exaggerated.
Yet, even before Auschwitz, the Soviets were systematically making MILLIONS of
polish people disappear.
I understand, our mind doesn’t want to believe that
such evil exists.
Authorities thought Piecki’s reports were exaggerated
too, and he was living it. No help came. That was until the war ended, and the US.
troops liberated the camps.
Some believe the #world is flat.
No gravity? Well, that’s precious. Things just fall
down.
Ever hear of Newton and Einstein and mathematical equations?
Circling the globe? “Planes are just fly in a big
circle,” they say.
Have you ever been talked into changing a
belief?
Maybe you’ve changed beliefs, but probably not in an argument.
You changed them because you believe in science and evidence and data, even if sometimes
it is only antidotal, but large enough to make a dent in your belief
system.
One of my favorite
books is The Magic of Believing by
Clyde Bristol.
It might sound like I am talking out of two sides of
my face, one is that people believe stupid things, and second that I believe in
the magic of believing.
Let’s get a grip here. There are beliefs that fly in
the face of science, and there are beliefs that exalt the human condition.
Believe in yourself. Believe that you have what it
takes to make this journey through life. Believe that if someone is successful,
you can be. Believe in your own goodness, and that kindness matters. Believe in
walking gently on the earth, and to preserve as is humanly possible its resources
be it animal, mineral, plant, water or air.
It’s tricky when you’re holding a belief about
yourself or believing you can do, be or have your heart’s desire. Yet, belief
brings the subconscious into play. Believe in good things,
not bad.
My daughter looked up “Why people believe stupid
things,” on Google, and Google answered. That started me down this road.
We all believe certain things, and evidence
is low on the list.
We tend to believe something when we hear
it over and over.
Ad writers know this.
Propagandists know this.
Politicians know this.
Most people don’t know it.
Smart people can be the worst for holding onto a
belief, or they are good at rationalizing. They are sometimes too clever for
their own good.
When doctors didn’t believe in germs, they refused to
wash their hands and thus passed on childbed fever to new mothers. What doctor
would want to believe that he caused his patient to die?
When evidence to the contrary of a belief, such as
when Dr. Robert Collins (1829) said that it was the passing of cadaver germs to
laboring women that caused the infections, he was ridiculed.
In 1872 Dr Ignaz Semmelweis again presented germ evidence,
including closing the hospital, cleaning every square inch, making the doctors
wash their hands with chlorinated lime, and the result was that childhood fever
plummeted. But, according to belief hospitals and doctors slackened their
efforts and more women died.
Childbed fever raged for 50 years.
Smart women, yet on welfare and needed their babies
born in a hospital, were onto the fact that more women died of childbirth in
hospitals than at home, but since they needed a doctor’s verification to get
aid, many had their babies in the streets and told the doctors that the birth
came on so fast they couldn’t make it to the hospital.
They saved their lives and gave their child a mother.
The belief in long-held practices happens repeatedly
in the scientific community.
People in authority hold on to an old belief that
has endured in the system for so long it is canonized.
We hate to throw out our pet theories.
There are social,
cultural, family reasons, personal reasons, emotional reasons, why we hold
beliefs. We were raised to think that way. Something influenced us when we were
young, maybe a teacher of a particular book.
Most people are approval
seekers rather than truth seekers.
It’s our nature. We’re
social creatures. We want to fit in. How many times have you faked laughter at
a joke that wasn’t funny—well, I guess that’s being polite.
I suppose people believe
stupid things to fit into a group, to be a fraternity of like-minded souls set
out to battle the world. It makes them special.
Skinheads must fit into
that category, but their beliefs are based on hate.
Hate-filled people are more
dangerous than those saber-toothed tigers we used to run from.
We all love finding
someone who believes as we do. We immediately enter a garden of delights.
Yet, Brene’ Brown speaks
of “Braving the Wilderness,” meaning to stand alone if that’s what must be.
What is it that makes a
difference in the quality of people’s lives? Why do some people talk about
their dreams and never follow through, while others go for it?
Why do some rail about
their life conditions, and others turn dire circumstances into light?
Think of the little girl
who was raped at 9-years-old then taken for ice cream with blood running down
her legs. Later on, she was molested by two close family members. She gave
birth to a stillborn child—a pregnancy she hid until delivery time. She was
fired from a reporting position because she identified too strongly with her
subjects. This person turned to television and now is worth billions. She is
Oprah Winfrey.
And while I champion the
cause of science as a framework for beliefs, I also know that we are babes in
the woods regarding science, especially at a quantum level. How atoms work, and
sub-atomic particles, and that everything is energy is new to us. We know we
are electrical and chemical, but we don’t know the seat of intuition or ESP.
We know we are bathed in consciousness, but it
baffles us. It is our soul? Is it calling out to us?
And so we suppose and
create models, that’s all we can do until science catches up to our supposing.
“Keep believing, keep pretending, We’ll do
what we set out to do.”—Kermit the Frog
