Everyone believes they're right

During his administration in the 80s, Ronald Reagan introduced controversial economic changes that supported capital owners with tax cuts, and were heavily backed by large corporations and wealthy individuals. These tax cuts were, to some extent, a reverse-robin hood. Where new potential money was taken from the poor and given to the wealthy. All for the promise that it would trickle down to the people who actually need it; boosting the economy in ways that wouldn’t be possible had the money been given directly to the people in need.

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While the overall impact of Reaganomics on the US economy are still debated, one thing that’s for certain is it lined the pockets of large corporations with tons of cash. And they were absolutely delighted by it. Since those tax cuts in 1981 and 1986 (and probably even before then), large corporations have been doing absolutely everything they can to keep this narrative going through propaganda, astroturfing, campaign donations, funding prominent grifters, and other delightful activities. Specifically the idea that if you trust successful and wealthy people with your money —the same people who gave you Amazon same-day shipping and everything else you enjoy— you will feel those economic impacts coming back around as they put your money to better use.

Whether you think trickle-down economics is a way for corporations to coerce you into supporting the status quo on their behalf, or you choose to be wrong, it’s undeniable that it is an idea the wealthy have been pushing hard only because it benefits them. They have a vested interest in you supporting their ideas, and for most affected by it, this conflict of interest is apparent and makes it seem instantly suspicious. Trickle down economics simply runs on good vibes, and hopes to feel intuitive to a reader going “Oh I like having a new iPhone every year, so clearly they must be spending that money better than me.” It fails across the board when put to the test, but persists in economic discourse as a “zombie concept”, described by David Whyte in his book The Mythology of Business.

Zombie concepts are the ideas that stalk through politics like the living dead. They have no real explanatory power or evidential basis - but they follow us like zombies with the purpose of terrorizing us and preventing us from doing anything to challenge or stand in the way of corporate greed.

Like Reagan’s trickle-down economics, we are often faced with ideas presented to us by people who have a vested interest in us believing a certain concept. It’s relatively easy to recognize these when they’re as obvious as the wealthy telling you to give them all your money, but not quite as much when the party that aims to benefit from a set of beliefs is the collective human sub-conscience.

Skepticism

Humans are creatures who are fundamentally hard-wired for survival, and not the search for truth. For hundreds of thousands of years, we’ve been doing nothing but prioritizing our survival over absolutely anything else. All of our instincts, when it comes to problem solving, tend to point to things other than uncovering truths, potentially uncomfortable ones. In fact, we’re so bad at this truth business, that one of the most groundbreaking advancement in human civilization was the establishment of the scientific method. We realized that our intuition is so pathetic at getting things right, that we had to come up with a separate system that bypasses our knee-jerk reaction of what we hold to be true about the universe and our observations of it. Because we often prefer easy, satisfying answers that confirm our existing beliefs over what might be the real truth, we had to find a new way of thinking that can lead us towards it as we hadn’t been doing a great job in the past. Even for seemingly simple problems.

Take The Birthday Paradox for example. The problem asks “How many people would you need in a room for at least 2 people to share the same birthday?” At first glance, the answer seems obvious. There are 365 days in a year so for 2 people to share a birthday (not accounting for year), maybe something like 180 people would be needed for there to be ~50% chance. But it turns out, that’s wildly inaccurate. For that 50% figure, it actually only takes, on average, 23 people in a room. Significantly fewer than what you might have guessed at first, probably even if you accounted for more people resulting in a higher chance of a match. For some, this is such an appalling result that they often don’t believe it and argue against it because of how intuitive the incorrect answer feels. And how wrong the mathematical answer seems without a deep dive into probability theory and permutations. Most of us are just not capable of incorporating advanced mathematics into our intuition.

This doesn’t mean that we are dumb, rather, it’s simply in our nature to prefer solving conflicts quickly rather than correctly. And to do otherwise is a lifelong struggle of checking your biases, confirming your results, doubting your findings and searching for proof. Something most people are not particularly enthusiastic about, since it takes a lot of work. Human intuition might help when you’re running from a bear —except if you start running from a Black Bear, then your intuition fails you there too— but not when you’re pondering the mysteries of the universe. In that case, you should probably be the last person you trust. You’re not really on the same team with yourself most of the time. Because you often want to believe in outcomes that conflict with reality, and that’s a dangerous temptation.

Religion

Since we’re hard-wired for survival and self-preservation, for as long as humans have existed, we’ve been curious to answer a few important questions that were literally a matter of life and death. Specifically, “Where did we come from?” and “What’s going to happen to me when I die?” If you’re a human being reading this, and not an all-powerful basilisk I definitely helped bring to existence, you’re almost certainly curious about these questions too.

Before we attempt to search for an answer here, it’s important to recognize that this is a very sensitive topic. Not because religion is a touchy subject for many people, but because it’s an area where we are especially susceptible to our own biases, many of which most of us have never even consciously been aware of. These are questions that we desperately want to find answers to, one where our evolutionary intuition is in heavy conflict with our search for truth. We are not an impartial party. We want there to be an afterlife for our survival so badly, that any conclusion we draw on the existence of such a concept has to be scrutinized with the likes of an electron microscope. Like how you might not want to trust big corporations when they tell you that giving big corporations more of your money is the correct way to solve the world’s problems. We have a vested interest in believing an outcome that we think benefits us, like proponents of Reaganomics have a vested interest in you believing that the money given to them will trickle down to you.

Yet for most of human history, we’ve had very few reservations when it came to accepting comforting answers for our most disconcerting questions. We want there to be an afterlife, which is why for thousands upon thousands of years, people have sought comforting ideas to cling on to as they faced the grim reality of their own mortality. You are not going to live forever, but don’t worry. When you die, Zeus will

Part of the reason why we is because our sub-conscious is ignorant towards epistemology. We don’t know the existence of knowledge that we don’t know, so often times we make decisions as if we know all relevant details. With no skepticism whatsoever.

There are so many people in the world who believe in a religion. Many who feast during Ramadan. Who go to church on Sundays. And those who’ve lived and died by —even committed atrocities in the name of— religions that we now refer to as mythologies because nobody believes in them anymore.

The unifying characteristic among these people is that they think they’re right in their beliefs, and that others are wrong. Statistically speaking that’s not even possible. How can everyone be right all at the same time? Given the claims that these religions make, there’s at most one that can be correct, and others that are not. Made up, I suppose?