Guest post: The costliest dogma
Originally a comment by Artymorty on #No BeKind for you.
Because trans identity tops an all-important oppression hierarchy and the purest form of virtue is being a “trans ally”.
I think it’s the purest form of virtue because it’s the costliest dogma to uphold. That’s always been the way with religion: the more preposterous and ostentatious the display of commitment — i.e., the harder it is to merely casually dabble, which is to say, the more expensive the dues are in that particular membership “tier” — the more virtuous one is seen to be, at least among fellow aspirants to that particular religion. That’s why the most committed members of any religion demonstrate it by wearing conspicuous articles of clothing — yarmulkes, turbans — and/or by the male members forcing the women under their control to be covered by garments whenever they’re in public — enshrouding them in burqas of varying degrees of severity.
And the more loudly one demonstrates their belief in the dogma — especially the most “difficult” parts, i.e., the hardest parts to swallow — the more virtuous one is presumed to be. This is the principle that drives Muslim suicide bombers, for example.
To my mind, this is all best understood through the lens of behavioural science — to be specific, something like, evolutionary behavioural neuropsychology, if that’s even what they call it? I.e., human culture is irrational and crazy because the human brain is just a primitive monkey with an overactive prefrontal cortex, which has deluded itself into thinking it’s a lot smarter than it actually is.
People covet exclusivity. Hell if I know exactly why, but it’s evidently a built-in drive that lives somewhere deep down in the brain where the animal instincts allegedly are, near the cerebellum. It’s apparently related to tribal in-group insecurity. This phenomenon isn’t limited to religion; the entire fashion industry runs on it, for one other notable example.
It’s trans ideology’s naked preposterousness that has made it irresistible to that primitive part of the brain that controls tribal in-group signalling, and which subsequently set off a frenzy among insecure left-wing people to see who can smother themselves in it the most. I don’t think that the autogynephiles who made up the religion planned it that way; it was just dumb luck that their silly belief system happened to fit the bill. Call it “keeping up with the Transes.”
As this religion falls apart, we’ll see the majority of people quietly slink away from it — like a fashion fad that’s come and gone. But I think we’ll also see a small few, the ones who’ve mentally cornered themselves into fighting to the bitter end, become extremely violent, more along the lines of Islamist terrorists.
Food for thought there, OB. I take it that we can expect the first transbomb to be chucked by the first transterrorist any day now. But what will be the likely target? I would predict something genuinely female with which the phony females find beyond their reach, no matter how hard they try.
A YWCA HQ perhaps? Female beachwear shops? It’s a tough one.
Hmmm. Interesting.
I guess there’s a kind of peacock dimension to it. Famously, a peacock’s tail is – if anything – a hindrance; therefore being able to display such a ludicrous appendage shows fitness, and the tail therefore actually and unexpectedly confers a reproductive advantage.
So I wonder if there’s something of that going on: that in a social species, there is some kind of advantage to be had from some mechanism that, given the right conditions, is precisely the kind of mechanism that makes some people go balls-out for lunacy. (For example, it makes evolutionary sense for parents to exert an irrational amount of effort on their own kids over anyone else’s, and this holds whatever the objective merits of other people’s kids. Even if your own child is the stupidest and ugliest in the kindergarten, you’ll not abandon it for a better model. Adhering to odd causes makes sense.)
But there is a sense in which the peacock-tail is pathological; we could easily imagine a lineage of peacocks in which that trait is overdeveloped and counterbalances the advantage. By analogy, maybe a useful propensity in some cases goes haywire. The thing that makes us believe – genuinely believe, with all our hearts – that our kids are the best kids ever is the thing that allows us to believe in interventionist gods, gender souls, our abilities to stop drinking if we wanted, and all the rest of it.
If I remember correctly there are a lot of peacock-tail type adaptations that are lethal to so many of the havers that it’s not clear they’re worth the price?
This all harkens back to a paper I read some 20 years ago or so, on what was termed the “economics of religion”. I did a bit of Googling just now, and I think the paper was Why Strict Churches Are Strong by Laurence Iannaccone.
It argued that costly signalling — for example dress requiments, dietary restrictions, and pledges of belief in unbelievable things — deters freeloaders and builds trust among church members.
One of the paper’s big insights was to strip away any judgment about the plausibility of any sect or cult’s specific dogmas, instead looking at sects’ participants in economic terms — as “utility-maximizing agents” who seek to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of their endeavours. Membership in any sect is a product of incentives, opportunity costs and trade-offs in order to achieve their goals. Ostentatious profession of belief in unbelievable things can be understood to be primarily driven by those things — incentives, opportunity costs, and trade-offs in pursuit of broader life success — rather than acts of critical thinking aimed at uncovering truth.
Costly signalling therefore enables the in-group members to better pool resources and gain advantage over non-members, rather like an economic club or cartel.
The economic perspective on costly signalling dovetails elegantly with work that’s being done in behavioural and evolutionary science, and the “religious economics” model of costly signalling echoes the models of grooming behaviour, alarm calling, and other “costly” rituals among animal tribes, especially those that show “parochial altruism” — favouritsm towards in-group members and aggression towards out-group members within the same species. Costly rituals and signals therefore help species scale up and overcome complex collective-action problems, by fostering inter-group competition, where the stronger (more cohesive) groups outcompete the weaker ones. The cohesion this is based on is reinfored through the costly signals the group members must perform.
Some exampes in other species are vervet monkeys, whose individuals take turns being on alarm call lookout duty, putting themselves at great risk to set off an alarm call to protect the rest of the tribe. Chimpanzees and ants demonstrate parochial altruism, forming warring tribes.
Punishment is another aspect to this: aggressive punishment of those perceived as “cheaters” who fail to pay the necessary cost-signalling dues.
As for the comparison to peacock feathers, sometimes costly signals can also act as handicap signals in much the same way that luxury fashion goods do among humans — which is to say, they are demonstrations that one has such an abundance of resources that they can expend them on highly impractical things.
I would argue that all of these models can be clearly, vividly observed in the case of the gender cult — but the benefits will only be there in the short term. As the cult collapses, the benefits it has so far conferred on its membership are going to end up massive liabilities as the belief system crashes into the hard facts of the material world, and the legal and ethical consequences of the cultists’ abandonment of reality bear down.
Also, I hope Bjarte checks in with more insights from the game-theory angle. This all seems very amenable to game-theory analysis, doesn’t it?
Thank you, Artymorty, for this, and for all your other, perceptive comments.
I wonder whether the extraordinarily distinction between the Mind (that exists up there, somewhere beyond the smoke and stir of this dim spot) & the Body that runs through Western thought is not in fact a fond delusion and one that is particularly strongly, and largely unconsciously, held by W.E.I.R.D (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich & Democratic) people — as Joseph Henrich calls them in his excellent “The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous”.
One great problem, it seems to me, is that if we are W.E.I.R.D, we tend to assume that “we” are rational and properly “individual”, whereas benighted others (members of “strict churches” and cults, etc.) are not; and we fail to notice how we ourselves are subject to precisely the same kind of — what shall I call them? — evolutionary “controls” as those others, however intelligent and above-it-all we may suppose we are. We all, whether we are scientists, business people, politicians, artists of one kind or another, or intellectuals, belong to groups within which there is in-fighting and also competition with other groups; and, unless there is damage to the brain of a particular kind, we have emotions, which are socially necessary and important for making decisions, and so are not, in the Platonic and Cartesian way, opposed to the intellect.
Antonio Dammasio, in “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason & the Human Brain”, cites the example of a patient he calls, simply, “Elliot”. “Elliot” had been operated on in order to remove a large and growing tumour in his brain. The result was that, though his “intellect” (I put it in quotation marks since the intellect is not something that exists in isolation from the rest of the brain) was unimpaired, and Elliot did very well indeed on reasoning tests, when it came to making a choice or a decision on the basis of knowledge and reasoning he was unable to do so. In Dammasio’s words, “I began to think that the cold-bloodedness of Elliot’s reasoning prevented him from assigning different values to different options. “ He then makes the proposal that “Reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behaviour” — equally important as “uncontrolled or misdirected emotion”. In the rest of the book, he explores this possibility, and shows how the intellect cannot be separated from the emotions.
Which brings me to “intellectuals”, who are seldom studied in respect of their thought and behaviour in the way church-goers or cult-members are. They should be. I know an American academic here who, despite his intelligence and his broad knowledge of his subject, parrots MAGA talking points (Kamala Harris was a “mediocre DEI hire”, etc — we have heard that easy slur from someone who used to comment here) and is a great supporter of the Trump regime, despite all the horrors that are happening. Intellectuals like the jurist Carl Schmitt, the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the diarist, essayist & novelist Ernst Jünger bore a great deal of responsibility for Hitler’s rise to power; the intellectuals behind Project 25 bear a great deal of responsibility for what is going on now in the USA. And a great number of intellectuals bear responsibility for trans-ideology — and, I suggest, much greater responsibility than the unpleasant fools and followers who mount attacks on Rowling and others on the internet.
I have just finished a long essay for a British literary review in which I make comparisons between the writings of the Anglo-Welsh poet & painter David Jones, author of one the greatest works to come out of World War I, “In Parenthesis”, and the German Ernst Jünger, author of another of the greatest works to come out of that war, “Storm of Steel”. In one of the notes to it I quote from the good introduction to Jünger’s best-known novel, “On the Marble Cliffs”, a new translation of which has fairly recently been published by New York Review Books. In her introduction, Jessi Jewezka Stevens quotes from a letter to the editor published in Der Spiegel in 1982 in response to one of Jünger’s last public interviews. The letter was written by a local representative of the Bundesland of Niedersachen: “In certain academic circles, it is often discussed to what extent simple-minded workers are made receptive to totalitarian movements. All too often, this discussion overlooks the extent to which these same self-appointed élites distance themselves from basic democratic values.”
I’m sorry for the length of this. But I think the matter is important.
l
I should add that the political thought of Carl Schmitt, in particular, is influential on the extreme right in the USA as well as in Europe and Russia. You may find the praise of Jünger’s fascist treatise “The Worker” offered by that wholly contemptible Russian thinker Alexandr Dugin (an ardent supporter of Putin and, for obvious and cynical reasons, Donald Trump) on the American alt-right website Arktos — (https://arktos.com/2023/08/29/ernst-junger-and-the-worker/). A number of other pieces about Jünger, Julius Evola and other fascist thinkers may be found on alt-right websites. Most people are unaware of the great and dangerous influence late-19th- & early 20th-century fascist thinkers have been having on the extreme right over the last decade or two.
I recommend watching this debate, in which Mehdi Hassan has a debate with, individually, about 20 young American fascists (to put it bluntly), and in which the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s principle of the “friend-enemy” (whereby you define some “other” as “the enemy” and thereby define your own identity against theirs) is brought up by one of them, a young Catholic man who thinks Hitler was rather nasty to the Catholic church, but cannot bring himself to condemn the Nazis’ slaughter of Jews and other disfavoured groups who have been defined as “enemies”:
https://youtu.be/2S-WJN3L5eo?si=ZBcJvb7aLW2-Y9Eh
@Ophelia –
To individuals, sure. But there must be some benefits on a species-wide scale (and a corresponding advantage of a high attrition rate), otherwise they’d not be selected for.
I guess in our context, things get complicated because we’re talking about things that people decide to align with, rather than things that they just grow. But, still: being seen to be willing to put in the energy might well pay off for enough people. And, of course, it may be that what we see in cases like ours is a dysfunctional version of a generally perfectly functional trait.
Thanks, Arty #5
I will have more to say on the topic once I recover from Norwegian Post-Night-Shift Sleep Deprivation Syndrome.
One formulation I keep returning to is how TRAs have “burned all bridges behind them” (the bridges – like the ships of Cortez’s soldiers – representing the possibility of a safe retreat). When I have used the phrase in the past, it was usually in the context of a larger argument about cognitive dissonance, and saving face, and having a psychological stake in sticking to your guns forever.
But of course the stake isn’t only psychological. If there is justice in the world, there will some day be a reckoning during which some heads are going to roll. I see no possibility of restoring any trust in the medical profession, the legal system, the police, academia, journalism etc. until this has happened. On the other hand, this also means there are a lot (!!!) of people out there (including some very powerful ones!) who have a very large stake in making sure the day of reckoning never arrives and that justice never prevails. Like Cortez’s soldiers they have bet everything on victory, and now there is no possible consequence of fighting on that’s worse than failure to do so. Apart from what I have previously written about cognitive dissonance and rationalization, this is why I am not as optimistic as many others that the Tr… craze is going away any time soon.