Loserthink, page 6
The first example comes from an opinion article on CNN’s website, in which it asks this question: Why do so many people with racist values embrace the GOP?
I can’t read minds, so it is unclear what the author’s internal thoughts are. Is he a clever and unscrupulous persuader who knows he is departing from reason and hopes others don’t notice? Or is he someone who can’t tell the difference between a lack of imagination and a solid argument? We don’t need to solve that mystery to see that the argument presented relies on the readers’ lacking imagination. I can demonstrate that here by suggesting several perfectly reasonable ways to explain this observation.
One potential explanation is that the writer is suffering from a form of political hysteria that grips both sides of the political divide, albeit at different times and in different ways. The article includes a link to a known hoax—the idea that President Trump called racists in Charlottesville “fine people.” That fake news is still widely reported as fact. The president was not referring to the racists, or anyone “marching with them” at Charlottesville, as fine people. He was referring to both sides of the Confederate statue issue as fine people. He clarified his opinion and denounced the racists (as he has done many times) when asked to do so. The existence of a known hoax in the article suggests the writer either believes the hoax, which discredits the rest of his opinions, or he is intentionally promoting a hoax, which also means his opinion lacks credibility. Those are a few explanations I can imagine.
The most ordinary explanation I can imagine for why racists prefer President Trump is that they believe CNN’s fake news (using the Charlottesville “fine people” hoax as an example) in exactly the same way nearly every Democrat does. Now add the bias that comes from wanting to believe something, and you have the perfect recipe for confirmation bias.
Another ordinary (and reasonable) explanation is that President Trump’s stated goal of treating all Americans the same feels to racists like a better world than whatever they imagine Democrats are offering. I can’t read the minds of racists, but one assumes racists believe Democrats will transfer money and influence from white people to people of color, and change the culture at the same time.
It is easy to imagine that racists want fewer brown people to immigrate into the country while mainstream Republicans want tighter border control for economic and security reasons. That would put them on the same side but for entirely different reasons.
I can also imagine that racists have trouble recruiting new members, for obvious reasons, so anytime they can graft their philosophy onto something that is already happening in the world, such as a new president who is strong on border security, it draws attention to their cause in a way they find productive.
If the only explanation you can imagine for why racists back a Republican president is that he is whistling to them in a secret code that nearly every Democrat claims to hear, I suppose anything is possible. But it would border on insane for any politician in the United States to think that strategy is a good one. And it fails to imagine the far more ordinary explanations I just mentioned.
To add some context, I like going to Las Vegas to work on my book and enjoy the food. Other people go to Vegas for the gambling, drinking, and anonymous sex. One of the most normal situations in the world is that people like the same thing (in this case Las Vegas) for wildly different reasons. In politics too, people can support the same candidate for wildly different reasons. To imagine people like a person or a place for the same reasons is a serious lack of imagination and a denial of the most common experience in our shared reality.
A lack of imagination is common to both sides of the political divide. For example, this week I have been bombarded on Twitter by followers of a hoax called Q. Believers in this obvious (to me anyway) hoax say an anonymous person or persons with government insider information is leaking secrets to the public as part of some sort of scheme to support President Trump against so-called Deep State traitors.
The followers of this hoax argue with me that any evidence consistent with Q being a government insider is all you need, so long as you can’t imagine any other explanation for what you are observing. For example, President Trump once tweeted a photo that had as its file name “DoitQ,” which believers took as a signal that President Trump is pro-Q. Several people asked me on Twitter to explain how that could possibly be the file name unless President Trump was cleverly confirming with this “secret Q whistle” the validity of Q.
I explained on Periscope that the most ordinary explanation is that whoever named the file is a follower of Q. Presidents of the United States rarely get involved in naming files. Maybe it was the work of a prankster or a hacker. And you can’t rule out coincidence, given that there is a 100 percent chance the environment would serve up some sort of random Q-related reference that seemed like a cryptic message but isn’t. I can’t put odds on any of those explanations being the accurate one, and perhaps there are several more explanations I have not imagined. All I can say with a sense of certainty is that it is unlikely a sitting president named a computer file to send a secret message that was disguised as a totally public message.
Q supporters also ask how it could be possible that a prominent Q supporter got a photo opportunity with President Trump in the White House, which happened in the summer of 2018, unless the president was signaling that Q was real. The most ordinary explanation is that the president takes photos with lots of people, and it doesn’t mean he knows what they are all up to. In the summer of 2018, I also visited the Oval Office and posed for pictures with the president. It doesn’t mean he endorses all of my opinions, or even knows what they are.
Life is messy and unpredictable. Sometimes our underpowered and biased brains correctly deduce a chain of cause and effect. But the accuracy of our opinions is deeply influenced by our ability to imagine alternate explanations for events.
So what do you do about that?
One thing I find helpful is growing old. It’s a slow process, but totally worth it compared to dying. Oldsters such as myself have vastly more experience than the young at being simultaneously wrong and also surprised about it. In time, we come to understand how easy it is to be confident in our opinions and yet spectacularly wrong. Or at least we do if we have been keeping score. And that’s exactly what I recommend doing. Make a mental note every time you find yourself being wrong about something you thought you couldn’t possibly be wrong about. Focusing on your track record can prime you to understand there can be lots of different explanations for a set of facts, and you can’t always think of them all.
The failure-of-imagination problem is a risk in every aspect of your ordinary life, from your workplace dramas to your love life. The next time you find yourself generating a belief about why something went wrong, keep in mind that one of the most common explanations for anything in life is something you didn’t imagine.
If you can’t imagine any other explanation for a set of facts, it might be because you are bad at imagining things.
CHAPTER 5
Thinking Like an Historian
One of the strongest walls in our mental prisons is a thing called history. And history isn’t even real. I mean that in two ways.
The first way history is not real is that whoever is in charge gets to write history any way they like. And the way they like it is whatever way keeps them in power and looking awesome. That means you should expect the history in one country to be substantially different from the history in another, even when discussing the same events. Which history is the accurate one? Answer: neither. Both are filtered through politics and distorted to the point of being misleading if not outright untrue, except for the basic facts such as names and dates.
When I was a kid, I learned in history classes that bold European explorers discovered and settled America. They were well-intentioned folks who tried and largely failed to befriend the Native American population. Unfortunately, said my textbooks, the Native Americans were too primitive to understand important concepts such as private property, and one thing led to another until the European settlers graciously granted Native Americans their own reservations. For free! Somewhere along the line, the Native Americans taught the pioneers how to grow corn. That’s the condensed, racist version of history I learned.
But I assume that had Native Americans written our history books, the accounts might look quite different. Those books might say Columbus was a psychopathic monster, and that European invaders pursued genocide to steal land from the locals. Or something along those lines.
As a young person, I took it for granted that my country had the accurate version of history and everyone else was lying or misinformed. It never occurred to me that every government invents its own version of history to brainwash their population. We are raised to assume we are the lucky ones who learn accurate history while evil leaders elsewhere are duping their citizens. I hope you can see how unlikely it is that any country is presenting history to its children in an objective way.1
I’m sure history books get most of the big stuff right. For example, slavery really existed, and World Wars I and II really happened. But context matters, and every story can be told multiple ways. Ever since the presidential election of 2016, we have been bombarded with fake news from every political direction. Both sides generate fake news, and lots of it. Which versions will historians choose to put in textbooks? They have multiple realities from which to choose. My bet is that historians will choose versions of history that are best suited for indoctrinating kids to be obedient and productive citizens. Truth will be a secondary consideration, as always, when it comes to socializing children into productive adults.
If you believe you learned an accurate version of history in school, you are probably wrong.
There is a second and more profound way in which history keeps us in mental prison: it can have too strong a hold on us. If you can learn to release that hold, another wall of your mental prison will fall.
In my case, my childhood was horrific in ways I don’t like to discuss, and those memories intruded mightily on my adult happiness long after the events themselves dissolved into the nothingness of history. The past didn’t exist anywhere except in my memories, but that was enough to ruin my present happiness. I learned that I could control those destructive thoughts by crowding them out with work, intellectual pursuits, and other distractions. Over time, the memories faded from lack of attention, and now I don’t consider them to have any impact on my current happiness.
If bad memories are keeping you from being happy, try crowding out the destructive memories with new and interesting thoughts. Stay busy, in mind and body, and time is on your side.
The best example of history as a mental prison is the Middle East. Almost everyone in that region is anchored to history in one negative way or another. Here is a summary of every debate in the Middle East.
PERSON 1: Do you remember the time people like you did terrible things to people like me?
PERSON 2: That was only because people like you did bad things to people like me first.
PERSON 1: People like you started it!
And so on to infinity.
If you could erase the knowledge of history from every citizen in the Middle East, I suspect it would be easier to live in peace. The trouble happens when people try to manage events in the present to fix the past. That isn’t possible. You can’t fix the past, and trying to do so generally won’t lead to anything good.
From a persuasion perspective, history can be a useful tool. If I can make you feel guilty for something your demographic group did to mine, I might be able to influence you in a way that is good for me. But don’t make the mistake of believing that history matters in situations in which all it does is limit how you think about your options. History doesn’t have to control you.
History (even the fake kind) can be useful for persuading others through guilt. But don’t make the mistake of persuading yourself that history should matter to your choices today.
My life, which has always been strange, got stranger in April 2018 when Kanye West tweeted nine separate outtakes from an online video I made on the Periscope app. I was talking about Kanye’s ideas on escaping from “mental prisons.”
By then I had become well known for writing about President Trump’s persuasion skills. Kanye was famous for lots of things, but somewhere in the top twenty was his public service commercial after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in which he said, “President Bush doesn’t care about black people.” So we know Kanye isn’t a Republican booster, and that matters to this story.
In 2018, Kanye visited President Trump at the White House and declared that he loved the man, but not necessarily his politics. That unexpected bromance created a dangling thread in the fabric of reality, which Kanye later yanked by retweeting my videos.
It seems that no mental prison can hold Kanye. His “occupation”—if you can call it that—includes rapper, singer, songwriter, music producer, fashion designer, entrepreneur, and political/social activist, to name a few accomplishments. Time magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World in both 2005 and 2015. And Kanye has repeatedly teased a run for the presidency in 2024, which I take seriously.
By the time you think Kanye can’t or shouldn’t do something, he’s already doing it. Or in the case of tweeting my videos, doing it nine times. I don’t have to tell you that tweeting content from the creator of Dilbert doesn’t help you in either your fashion business or your music business. It was a risky move for his brand, and probably no one on earth, including me, would have advised him to do it. He did it anyway. Evidently, he isn’t trapped in the mental prison that others would build for him.
Kanye’s message was that focusing on the past creates a sort of mental prison that limits your options. In the simplest form, if a white male in America has ten ways to succeed and an African-American only has eight, it isn’t productive to focus on the difference. It is more productive to pick a path to success and take it. In the long run, nothing persuades like success. We all have the option of living in a mental prison of the past or creating the future we want. Kanye is a creator.
To put this in context, when problems are huge, you need big tools to fix them. Slavery was a huge problem, and it took a big tool—the Civil War—to fix it. But that wasn’t enough to fix racism in America, obviously. The civil rights movement was the next tool, and it was a smaller tool than a civil war, but still enormous in scope and impact. In recent decades, the legal system tried to mop up what it could of remaining racism. That was a smaller tool than the civil rights movement, but still a big tool. Today’s “institutional racism” is still a huge problem, say many smart people, but we probably can’t fix it with civil wars, civil rights legislation, or lawyers. We need a tool that better fits the task. Kanye suggested moving away from focusing on the past and getting on with the business of succeeding. That makes sense in my worldview, because, as I said, nothing changes minds and creates new options as effectively as success.
President Obama’s political genius was that he ran for president on his talent and policies. He didn’t ask us to elect an African-American president to compensate for slavery, racism, or anything else. If you want to persuade white people, Obama showed you the gold standard for doing it.
Asian-Americans followed a similar strategy. They too were the victims of intense racism throughout the history of this country. But they also had clear paths to success, and took them. Today, Asian-Americans are doing better in terms of education and economics than most folks in America.
I contend that escaping from our mental prisons is how we will unlock the Golden Age. And to do that, we are best served by focusing on systems for success, as opposed to past injustices. We should not forget or minimize the past, as it serves us in a number of ways. But we can choose to focus on the paths forward instead of the footprints behind us, and as a strategy for success, that mindset is probably the right tool for the job.
Focusing on the past when the present offers sufficient paths to success is loserthink. It is better to focus on your own systems for success, and when you succeed, watch how winning fixes most problems.
DOES HISTORY REPEAT?
If an advanced species from another planet sent a scout to spy on earth and report back, the scout might describe humans this way:
ALIEN SCOUT: “The planet is dominated by some sort of organic robots. Their operating system uses a faulty pattern recognition algorithm that is designed to make it easier for them to hate each other.”
Nailed it!
Our tiny brains don’t have the capacity to grasp the complexities of life and then process that knowledge to make smart decisions. We only think we can. What we do instead of rational decision-making is employ a sloppy form of pattern recognition to make sense of our world.
There are three important things to know about human beings in order to understand why we do the things we do.
Humans use pattern recognition to understand their world.
Humans are very bad at pattern recognition.
And they don’t know it.
We can’t tell the difference between valid patterns that might predict something useful and something that simply reminds us of something else but means nothing.
Our meager talents at pattern recognition wouldn’t be much of a problem if we realized how often we see meaning in patterns where none exist. When you expect to be fooled, you can be on the lookout for it. But if you expect the opposite—that you will be wise, correct, and sexy in most situations—you are primed to be fooled.
