Strategic Culture Foundation
23 September 2017
The
more people there are who ignore facts that contradict their beliefs,
the likelier a dictatorship will emerge within a given country. Here is
how aristocracies, throughout the Ages, have controlled the masses, by
taking advantage of this widespread tendency people have,
to ignore contrary facts:
What
social scientists call “confirmation bias” and have repeatedly found to
be rampant,* is causing the public to be easily manipulated, and has
thus destroyed democracy by replacing news-reporting, by propaganda —
‘news' that’s false — in a culture where lies which pump the agendas of
the powerful (including lies pumped by the billionaire owners of top
‘news’media and of the media they own) are almost never punished (and
are often not even denied to be true). Thus, lies by those powerful
liars almost always succeed at enslaving the minds of the millions, to
believe what the top economic-and-power class want those millions of
people to believe — no matter how false it might happen actually to be.
Recently,
a particularly stark example of this came to my attention. On 15
September 2017, an article that I wrote for the Strategic Culture
Foundation, and which was titled by a true statement that I had only
recently discovered to be true, was republished at a news-site that I
consider one of the best around, “Signs of the Times” or “SOTT” for
short, and a reader-comment there, simply rejected that title-statement
and the entire article, because it contradicted what the person
believes. This commenter entirely ignored the evidence that I had
provided in the article, which proved the statement to be true.
No
matter how irrefutable the evidence is, most people reject anything
which contradicts their deeply entrenched false beliefs, and this
reader-comment crystallized for me, this phenomenon of “confirmation
bias” — the phenomenon of ignoring evidence that contradicts what one
believes.
The article was titled “Liberalism doesn’t respect a nation’s sovereignty.” I
never knew that fact until I researched it, but I found, after looking
through (and my article quoting key documents from) the history of the
matter, that it’s actually the case: that liberalism (as it’s
understood and defined by the scholars of the subject, and as it’s based
upon the key formative documents of the historical tradition,
“liberalism”) rejects a nation’s sovereignty. This fact shocked
me to discover; so, I wrote an article documenting it, and SCF accepted
it, and it then became republished at a few other sites, including
SOTT.
The
reader-comment at SOTT which for me personified confirmation-bias, was
(in its entirety): “This is a rather new twist blaming liberals for
invading countries. I've always associated liberalism with the left wing
and democratic, progressive politics. I've always associated
conservatism with the right wing, big business, militarism and invading
other countries. Trying to move the goal posts, are we?”
That
person never clicked onto my article’s links documenting the case, nor
even read the quotations given in the article itself from John Locke and
from Adam Smith, who were key founders of “liberalism” as that
tradition has come down to us. He instead ignored all of that evidence, and stated — entirely without evidence of any sort — that I (and SOTT, and SCF, for publishing it) were “Trying to move the goal posts.”
I (a Bernie Sanders voter, and a lifelong progressive and opponent of conservatism) am “Trying to move the goal posts” — how?
By pointing out the manufactured phoniness of ‘liberalism’? By pointing
out a key way in which liberalism was designed by its aristocratic
sponsors (in this case by the aristocrats who sponsored Locke and
Smith), to be an ideology that would encourage conquest, empire, and
discourage democracy (which is based upon the sanctity of national
sovereignty — based upon the lack of imposition of government by or on
behalf of anyone who isn’t a resident on the land). Liberalism, I show there, was designed for Empire, not for democracy. That reader simply refused to consider the evidence.
People
who insist upon deceiving themselves disgust me. Anyone who blocks out
the key relevant facts and persists in believing the lies they were
raised with, or became fooled into believing, doesn’t harm only themselves
by the lies they believe; they vote on the basis of the lies they
believe, and thus these people who refuse to be open-minded destroy democracy,
and invite control of the nation by the aristocracy (who sponsor the
proponents of those lies). People who refuse to question their own
beliefs, become increasingly putrid pools of their own false beliefs,
which have been created and nurtured and sustained and become larger and
larger pools of lies, by constant repetition from the media and
lobbyists of the rich and powerful, so as to enable the exploiters to
enslave the masses, via those constantly repeated and embellished lies.
Such
self-‘justifying’ fools, who refuse to clean-up their conceptual pool
that’s been increasingly polluted by lies, are enemies of democracy, no
matter how much they may consider themselves to be ‘liberals’. They
don’t even know the reality of what liberalism is. One thing that it definitely is not (as
my article documented) is progressivism (which is utterly opposed to
foreign conquest and to the entire imperial project of imposed rule,
regardless whether by outright invasions or else by coups).
Thus, we have two dominant ideologies against progressivism: One is conservatism,
which everyone recognizes to be against progressivism and for Empire
and constant conquest, profitable war for the arms-merchants and for the
‘news’media owners who also benefit from stirring up invasion-fever,
not only like William Randolph Hearst did but today like they all do.
The other is liberalism, which hides that it’s actually conservative —
hides this, by being ever-so-sweet toward certain ethnicities or other
groups that are being oppressed domestically, and by vociferously
condemning conservatives for what is actually nothing more than the blatancy of conservatism’s favoritism toward the aristocracy.
An
authentic democracy cannot be based upon a “demos” (a public) that is
overwhelmingly composed of suckers — manipulated fools. Only by means of
the tiny aristocracy plus the huge mass of their suckers, does a
democracy degenerate into a fascism. (For example, something like this can
be supported overwhelmingly by the political Party that dominates the
U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, state capitals, state legislatures, and
runs the U.S. White House, in this ‘democratic’ nation — ‘democratic’
according to the propaganda; but if this were really a democracy, then
none of those politicians would be able to win public office.)
*
A well-established central finding of psychological research,
concerning “confirmation bias” or “motivated reasoning” (which are two
phrases referring to people’s tendency to believe whatever they want to
believe, regardless of any contrary facts), is that individuals evaluate
whatever they read or hear according to their pre-existing ideas about
the given subject. Specifically, psychologists have found that people
tend to pay attention to whatever confirms their existing ideas, and
tend to ignore whatever contradicts those pre-established beliefs.
For examples, the following studies are available online:
“Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs,” in the July 2006 American Journal of Political Science,
reported: “We find a confirmation bias – the seeking out of
confirmatory evidence – when [people] are free to self-select the source
of arguments they read. Both the confirmation and disconfirmation
biases lead to attitude polarization ... especially among those with the
strongest priors [prior beliefs] and highest level of political
sophistication [the highest degree of exposure to, and involvement in,
the given subject-matter that the study was dealing with].” Prejudices
were stronger among supposed experts than among non-“experts”: The more
indoctrinated a person was, the more prejudiced. “People actively
denigrate the information with which they disagree, while accepting
compatible information almost at face value.” Moreover, “Those with weak
and uninformed attitudes show less bias” (and this is actually one
reason why the best jurors at trials are generally people who are not
personally or professionally involved in any aspect of the given case –
they are “non-experts”).
Sharon Begley’s article in the 25 August 2009 Newsweek titled
“Lies of Mass Destruction: The same skewed thinking that supports a
Saddam-9/11 link explains the power of health-care myths [such as that
Obama’s health plan had ‘death panels’]” summarized the study in the May
2009 Sociological Inquiry, “‘There Must Be a Reason’: Osama,
Saddam, and Inferred Justification,” which had surveyed, during October
2004, 49 conservative Republicans who admitted they believed that Saddam
Hussein had caused the 9/11 attacks. This study found that 48 of these
49 extreme conservatives were utterly impervious to the
overwhelming factual evidence which was provided to them by the
presenters that contradicted this false belief they held.
A
study concerning not political conservatism but merely resistance to
new technologies is James N. Druckman’s “Framing, Motivated Reasoning,
and Opinions about Emergent Technologies,” which was presented at a
technological conference in 2009. He reported that, “factual information
... is perceived in biased ways ... (e.g., there is motivated
reasoning).” “Facts have limited impact on initial opinions.” Moreover,
“Individuals do not privilege the facts. ... Individuals process
new factual information in a biased manner. ... Specifically, they view
information consistent with their prior opinions as relatively stronger,
and they view neutral facts as consistent with their existing” views.
“Motivated Reasoning With Stereotypes,” in the January 1999 Psychological Inquiry,
found that, “When an applicable stereotype supports their desired
impression of an individual, motivation can lead people to activate this
stereotype, if they have not already activated it. ... People pick and
choose among the many stereotypes applicable to an individual,
activating those that support their desired impression of this
individual and inhibiting those that interfere with it.” Similarly,
another research report, “The Undeserving Rich: ‘Moral Values’ and the
White Working Class,” in the June 2009 Sociological Forum,
found that John Kerry had probably lost the 2004 U.S. Presidential
election to George W. Bush at least partly because white working class
voters overwhelmingly believed that Bush was like themselves because he
behaved like themselves, and that Kerry was not like themselves because
his manner seemed “snooty.”
Source: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/09/23/people-ignore-facts-that-contradict-their-false-beliefs.html
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