The cognitive demands of disbelief
The fully peer-reviewed journal, PLOS ONE, recently published a study about the intractability of deeply entrenched belief systems. It turns out that certain kinds of people are highly vulnerable to believing in authority figures. Disbelieving someone they have grown to regard as an authority figure, on the other hand, no matter how compelling the evidence that they are frauds such as Donald Trump, is sometimes simply too much work.
What kind of people are these? Some of them are precisely the kind of people who have been raised in strict authoritarian households where they are brought up to believe certain dogmas. Evangelical Christians are especially vulnerable to the phenomenon of authority worship. What’s more, because as children they are taught to uncritically accept Bible stories as inerrant truth, and because they are indoctrinated to unblinkingly surrender their will and their lives to a cosmic authoritarian dictator, their critical faculties necessary to resist repressive tyrannies in general remain arrested and immature, usually for the rest of their lives.
This could explain why MAGA Trump supporters find it cognitively easy to believe and surrender to Donald Trump, and difficult to accept evidence that contradicts their worshipful belief, no matter how strong that evidence might be. Evangelicals are wired to believe Trump’s falsehoods. To accept evidence that Trump is anything less than what they desperately need him to be turns out to represent an enormous amount of mental work that they are not prepared to undertake.
Therefore, children who are trained from birth to believe in and rely upon God as an all-powerful source of all that is true are far likelier to follow a demagogue who demands blind obedience and total credulity. To doubt such an authority would require a near impossible superseding command of themselves. It’s virtually impossible for them to step outside of their beliefs and into a world of cold, hard facts.
Those of you who recall that I am a former evangelical might wonder from where I found the internal strength to leave. The credit, I’m afraid, is not due to some special power I possess. I was not to that particular manor born. Instead of being indoctrinated from birth, I later chose that life when I was a teenager. That is how I found it so much easier to leave than someone who was born into an evangelical Christian world and knew no other existence. Much credit to those who are born into the life and, despite this, find the strength and uncommon maturity to leave.
So when we encounter someone with an intractable MAGA predisposition, what we’re sometimes really encountering is someone with a different kind of brain. To be sure it’s an underdeveloped brain, an immature brain, virtually stunted from birth and less able to see clearly what we have less trouble seeing. In short, they have never been given an opportunity to grow up.
Curiously, right wing-leaning politicians don’t necessarily come from evangelical backgrounds, though many of them do. Those that don’t possibly adopt their hypocrisy as part of their deceitful craft. Lauren Boebert, for example, became an evangelical Christian’s in 2009 when she was 23. She embraced the monster Trump with her eyes wide open. Her blindness may be explained by nothing so mysterious as native stupidity.
In the final analysis, it is going to be next to impossible to convince many MAGA Republicans that Trump is a liar and that they have been deceived, no matter how many criminal trials they see on TV and no matter how compelling the evidence.
Even after Berlin was reduced to flaming ruins, many Germans continued to believe in Adolf Hitler. For some, belief in tyrannical despots isn’t just a thing they do, it’s a thing they are, or a monster they willingly became. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.