Activism and the gift of delusion - Fooling yourself the better to fool others

Robert Trivers: Deceit and Self Deceit--Fooling yourself the better to fool others

Manu Joseph is right on the money in discussing the recent exchanges between Michael Specter and Vandana Shiva:

...Activism is not filled with the deluded, but it has a special place for them. They do well there because the balance of neutrality does not provide the intensity and drive that a powerful conviction does. An open mind is useless to a revolutionary. An open mind cannot convert other open minds. Activists have to stay with a cause for years, for decades, as the science changes, as the circumstances change, as the economy, people and the times change. They cannot do this if they have not given themselves completely to an idea. It is the belief that makes them special and sustains them. To allow even a germ of doubt is to demean their whole lives.

In the world of activism, delusion is a gift. The great and the ordinary are separated by this gift. Most of the time activists are up against very powerful and violent forces driven by self-interest, greed or a set of delusions. Such forces cannot be opposed merely by good intentions, a laughable thought. An indestructible conviction, and the imagination of messianic purpose, is the equal and opposite force against the extraordinary resources of, say, capitalism or nationalism. Without activists who are so strung we would be at the mercy of thugs.

Shiva has responded to Specter’s story as activists usually do — most of her defence is against accusations the story has not made. For instance, the story says that her claim that Monsanto’s herbicide causes autism was based on a poor interpretation of a research paper and that she had “committed a common, but dangerous, fallacy: confusing a correlation with causation.” In her defence, Shiva does not talk about herbicide or autism, but about how debt leads to suicide.

She has implied, in her defence, that Specter and The New Yorker are corrupt. On the social media, Shiva’s followers, too, defend her by defaming the writer and the magazine. Their faith in her is as indestructible as her belief in herself. A powerful delusion is always transmitted, and what is transmitted is often received.

‘Folie a Deux’, or ‘the madness shared by two’, is a psychiatric phenomenon that has other forms, like ‘the madness shared by a family’ or ‘the madness of many’, in which a primary source of a delusion transmits it to others. The relationship between the founder and the followers of a cult that believe they are about to receive an alien signal is an example of shared psychosis. But when thousands or hundreds of thousands of people believe in an irrational or an outlandish idea or a conspiracy theory that has been proven to be wrong, psychiatrists are reluctant to call it a disorder or a delusion. Because the sheer number of people involved makes it human nature or culture or subculture, or movement. Whatever be the name, the transmission of an activist’s idea to a type of people who are ripe to accept it is seldom through the medium of rationality. Rationality is a poor conductor of ideas.

(Manu Joseph is a journalist and the author of the novel The Illicit Happiness of Other People.)

@ Activism and the gift of delusion - Hindustan Times:



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