Reporting again from self-quarantine, your independent media 👋 Today we are going to do some more armchair sociology and psychologizing. Buckle up ("Click it or Ticket") and grab your favorite face cover, things are about to get sneezy. Might even add some abstractions and philosophy to the mix...

First things first, let's define a term: belief.

Regarding "Belief"

In English, we have this word "believe" which is quite peculiar. It has strong religious connotations. Many would say the question of whether or not someone is a Christian ultimately comes down to a question of belief. But what exactly does it mean to "believe"?

One way to look at "belief" is to see it as a publicly alignment to some cause. That is, one goes out in public and makes some assertion. They are bound to their word. This way of looking at belief makes a lot of sense because it has to deal with contracts and stuff, which America has a lot of maybe mostly owing to British origins.

Another way to look at "belief" is to evaluate what people do rather than what people say. Truly, if you believed your house was fire, you would do something about it, wouldn't you? By this definition of belief, we have to prove that we believe something by how we act. From certain stated axioms, do your actions (rationally) follow? If not, our actions reveal what we actually believe.

Now given two senses of the word "belief", I will proceed to characterize the crises of belief currently befalling many of the people of planet earth.

State of Disbelief

In both of the senses of the word "belief" above, we see that we are collectively in a state of disbelief. You probably can see the pun I am making with the word "state" too 😉

On the one hand, we see people making all sorts of assertions about the state of the world, what's going on. Then we look at what people are doing.

One person might be able to perfectly recite some ideology, giving the "right answers" by basic logic + mental algebra. But when that ideology doesn't line up with reality, we see what that person really believes in the second sense I gave above—their actions manifest where their real convictions lie.

Such behavior is sometimes can be called "hypocrisy", but I often see it as more of a struggle to reconcile a collapsing world view. Maybe "managing cognitive dissonance" or something like that for many people.

Theory Shmeary!

As everyone and their favorite non-profit is trying to push some ideology, it is not surprising that people often hold many incoherent "beliefs" when taken together as declarations of belief. One might at one time utter the words,

• Open borders! No kids in cages!
• Closed borders! Keep everyone safe, Drumpf is an overconfident idiot!
• Free market! We need everyone to have goods/services no matter the cost!
• Government rationing of supplies! Planned economy!

...and this is because these statements are taken from disjoint self-contained systems (though not necessarily so). One person can say them all; we are not computers that blow up if there is some "logical contradiction".

My analysis is that these things people say belong to the first sense of belief—publically making known one's adherence to some words. One might analyze this as a sort of speect act.

Globalists x NeoLiberals

One class of people I see getting hit hard are the relatively xenophilic ("foreign-stuff loving") types. These folks often like to celebrate how people/places/cultures that are not them are great. Imagine learning some foreign language of a people/culture you do not belong to (oh no, I see my reflection).

I see many of these folks turning inward, displaying their true colors. It is not about diversity and decentralization of power (e.g. competing US, European Union, Chinese, Russian, Pan-Indic, Islamic forces vying for power...), it is about issuing in a "democratic world order" in which the world is a zoo of cultures to visit with a German (not to be confused with Nazi, mind you) passport.

What they announce is that they embrace diversity, respect other cultures, etc. What their actions show they believe is that they have all the right answers and that these things should be exported at the point of a gun to the rest of the world.

In other words, the astute can see through the ideological virtue signalling of people saying how tolerant, diversity embracing, blah blah they are. Such behavior made sense to climb up corporate ladders and stuff in the pre-COVID-19 world. But when institutions shut down and do not intervene between reality, shit hits the fan with no intervening toilet paper. The horror!

Traditionalists vs Revolutionaries

Some people really like ritual, and just do stuff just because. I'll call them traditionalists. They may tell you that they don't need a reason for doing what they are doing, they just do. Insofar as these people are able to keep up their traditions, they seem pretty chill through all this quarantine business.

The traditionalist doesn't need to explain at every step. They act in a way that has led to survival in the past. The traditionalist believes tradition will allow them to weather this storm.

Let is call the opposite of traditionalist a revolutionary. Revolutionaries want to overturn tradition and forge a new path forward.

Ironically, being a "revolutionary" in a left-wingy sense has become quite... mainstream. So we see lots of self-proclaimed left wingers doing things like voting for Joe Biden. Voting to conserve the establishment. Lol.

In this way, the idea of the "silent majority" makes sense to me. We see people who make the gestures of "revolutionaries" at times, campaigning for social justice and all. But in the end, they are establishment mongers.

That's OK in my book; you don't choose everything about who you are, including dispositions towards certain behvaiors. I hope your "revolutionary" comrades do treat you alright though if you fall into this category.

So... what's your point?

In summary, we see many mismatches between word and deed all around us everyday. In a time of crisis, like with impending Corona-chan, it is evermore easy to see the "raw belief" of action.

I do not condemn widespread hypocrisy around me. Rather I observe a struggle to resolve ideologies—often fragmented and incomplete, consisting of collected sayings (c.f. Confucian Analects). People are being tested for what they actually believe in the sense that they are being forced into action. Certain actions reveal a mismatch between proclaimed ideology and assessment of reality.

Personally, I think it is important to not get too fixated on witch hunting based on proclaimed ideology because many people around the world just proclaim what they do to stay alive. Much of China says "yes communism!" because they didn't want to die; now they are acting in a very much "yes fascism!" way in the sense that we see a marriage of government and industry... PUNCH ALL CHINESE BECAUSE THEY ARE FACISTS?

Bruh.

Other languages aside

Other languages have lots of words (and even grammatical structure) to discuss all things epistemological (having to do with what knowledge and what is knowable, see SPE for more info).

Spanish has a word confiar which might sometimes be used in contexts similar to "believe". But this word is also often translated as things like "trust" (as in trust in the process).

The East Asian languages have translations from missionaries of words in the Bible dealing with belief.