Originally a comment by Artymorty on Stalling.

It’s truly fascinating watching the reactions from the UK left to the Supreme Court decision. I’ve always been fascinated by cults that collapse. What do doomsday cultists do after the deadline passed and the apocalypse never came? What goes on in their minds? The UK Supreme Court decision is rather comparable to that: an incursion of sobering reality that the delusional can’t simply pretend didn’t come to pass. It’s a devastating blow to the cult’s whole folkloric worldview and social structure.

Fascinatingly, many doomsday cults persevere even after their deadlines pass — the very ones they were so absolutely adamant were guaranteed to mark the end of the world, 100%, no margin for error — this is the day, and there’s no possibility that the apocalypse won’t come this time. And then the day comes to pass, and the apocalypse doesn’t. Yet, some of them stay with the group, more adamant than ever in its rightness, even in the face of its incontrovertible, humiliating wrongness.

(The Jehovah’s Witnesses were a doomsday cult, predicting specific dates for “Armageddon” from 1915 to 1925 or so, constantly revising as each day came and went. Most of the cult members walked away, shattered, but the hardcore only hardened: eventually they decided that Jesus did in fact come back and they witnessed it! But they’re still here on this mortal plain for now, for some reason or another. There’s some spiritual mopping-up to be done, loose ends to tie up, or something. I’ve no interest in the nitty-gritty of it. The details of their beliefs don’t actually matter. The fact that a tribal cohesion was formed is the bit that matters; logic was cut off for them from that point onwards, so who cares what crazy stories they’ve been telling themselves after that point.)

That’s the power of the human brain’s limbic system. We’re wired to prioritize tribal allegiance over rational thinking. It cuts off cult members’ access to their own critical thinking faculties so completely, they can’t process the most basic, simple, pieces of logic if they pose a threat to that tribal bond. The poor frontal cortex — the part of the brain that us non-cult-addled outsiders have such easy access to, and which can process so utterly, completely clearly that those poor saps have been led into a trap — that brain-processing region simply isn’t available to them, and therefore the basic facts of reality that only it can perceive, are quite literally invisible to them.

This was illustrated well in the HBO sci-fi drama Westworld, with its characters’ mantra, repeated incessantly: “That doesn’t look like anything to me.” It’s one of those puzzle shows, like Lost or Twin Peaks, where everything is a mystery. In this case, half the characters don’t know that they’re actually synthetic robots — biomechanical androids — living as cast members in an elaborate amusement park, while the flesh and blood among them are the wealthy patrons. But it turns out there are layers upon layers of illusion, and pretty quickly the viewer is puzzling through an intricate maze of artifice versus reallity. What’s fascinating and relevant here is the mechanism by which the androids are prevented from seeing the evidence that’s right in front of them, that they’re obviously robots: their artificial brains simply refuse to process anything that will give the game away. Upon being challenged with a photograph or any piece of evidence that they’re robots in a theme park, the inevitable response is a passive, “That doesn’t look like anything to me.”

“They cannot see the things that will hurt them. I’ve spared them that” says Anthony Hopkins, playing their creator. (Hammily. Entre nous, I’ve always found Hopkins a ham. Even his Hannibal Lecter was just a bit much for me, though I loved The Silence of the Lambs. Remains of the Day: another good film. Hopkins was still hammy AF in it.)

It’s a dark reminder to all of us that the primitive, tribal part of our brains, the ape that processes our monkey emotions, is ultimately in charge, and it only lets the critical thinking part pretend to take the wheel occasionally, only at times when the ape inside of us — the ape that IS us — doesn’t feel threatened. And boy, is it easy to trip the threat wire on our inner apes. You and me and every one of us is a slave to our limbic system: we’re easily wired up to ally ourselves to charlatans, and once that happens, we’re trapped. It can happen to virtually any of us. I’ve said repeatedly that GC Twitter turned into its own kind of tribe, and therefore fell into its own set of blind spots, inaccessible to critical thinking.

(I maintain that I’m a rare breed, somewhat uniquely immune to tribalism, owing to my uniquely traumatic childhood: because I had no friends and no tribal bonds to form as a child, my limbic system’s tribal-latching mechanism didn’t develop properly. And because it didn’t get wired up properly, because I had no friends as a feminine little boy, I’m better equipped to call out tribalistic bias when I see it. Which is fucking everywhere, all the fucking time. I’m a pain in the ass to virtually everyone, because I’m really really good at seeing everyone’s tribal biases, and I have a habit of saying so.)

Anyways, the UK Supreme Court decision that “trans women” are in fact men is one of those cult-devastating moments, like a doomsday clock ticking on past its deadline. And the way the UK left has reacted to it has had much of the same shape of cults facing their reckonings. The less-committed ones capitulate and let go. (Wes Streeting of the centrist Labour Party, for example, who finally gave in.) For the ones who’ve committed themselves too much to it, the sunk cost fallacy kicks in: like gambling addicts, they’re in a hole. They’ve sunk too much into asserting “trans women are women” and they just can’t bear the cost until it destroys their lives, and they hit rock bottom. Your Green Party nuts, your Owen Joneses and your Billy Braggs.