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the stark partisan divide over issues that should be simply factual, like whether the planet is warming or evolution happened.

The problem, in other words, isn’t ignorance; it’s wishful thinking. Confronted with a conflict between evidence and what they want to believe for political and/or religious reasons, many people reject the evidence. And knowing more about the issues widens the divide, because the well informed have a clearer view of which evidence they need to reject to sustain their belief system.

In fact, hardly any of the people who predicted runaway inflation have acknowledged that they were wrong, and that the error suggests something amiss with their approach. Some have offered lame excuses; some, following in the footsteps of climate-change deniers, have gone down the conspiracy-theory rabbit hole, claiming that we really do have soaring inflation, but the government is lying about the numbers

An early adopter of the QAnon mass delusion, on board since 2018, she held firm to the claim that a Satan-worshipping cabal of child sex traffickers controlled the world and the only person standing in their way was Trump. She saw him not merely as a politician but a savior, and she expressed her devotion in stark terms.

“The prophets have said Trump is anointed,” she texted me once. “God is using him to finally end the evil doings of the cabal which has hurt humanity all these centuries… We are in a war between good & evil.”

By 2020, I’d pretty much given up on swaying my mom away from her preferred presidential candidate. We’d spent many hours arguing over basic facts I considered indisputable. Any information I cited to prove Trump’s cruelty, she cut down with a corresponding counterattack. My links to credible news sources disintegrated against a wall of outlets like One America News Network, Breitbart, and Before It’s News. Any cracks I could find in her positions were instantly undermined by the inconvenient fact that I was, in her words, a member of “the liberal media,” a brainwashed acolyte of the sprawling conspiracy trying to take down her heroic leader.

Osama bin Laden had forced us to admit that, while the U.S. may legally separate church and state, it cannot do so intellectually. Beneath even the most ostensibly faithless of our institutions and our polemicists lie crouching religious lions, ready to devour the infidels who set themselves in opposition to the theology of the free market and the messianic march of democracy

As our political system depends on a shaky separation between religion and politics that has become increasingly unstable, scholars are sensing the deep disillusionment afoot and trying to chart a way out.

At its best, Religion for Atheists is a chronicle of the smoldering heap that liberal capitalism has made of the social rhythms that used to serve as a buffer between humans and the random cruelty of the universe. Christian and Jewish traditions, Botton argues, reinforced the ideas that people are morally deficient, that disappointment and suffering are normative, and that death is inevitable. The abandonment of those realities for the delusions of the self-made individual, the fantasy superman who can bend reality to his will if he works hard enough and is positive enough, leaves little mystery to why we are perpetually stressed out, overworked, and unsatisfied.

Both candidates have whipped up voter passions by offering ideologically comforting — and strikingly similar — narratives promising political revolution. Both would fail to achieve such a momentous national transformation because popular opinion and the country’s system of checks and balances would get in the way.

This is partially because both candidates are telling bits of their parties’ bases what they want to hear. But another reason is that they have the “credibility” that comes from spending years angering “establishment” politicians — that is, people who have been sullied by having to govern in the real world of constraints and tradeoffs.

Cruz and his acolytes blame corruption or weakness for the failure of Republican leaders to make good on the conservative agenda — rather than the fact that those leaders had to govern a country that is not as conservative as they are and that faces challenges that lack pat solutions.

In a 1946 essay, George Orwell wrote that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” It’s not just that we’re easily misled. It’s that, by “impudently twisting the facts,” we can convince ourselves of “things which we know to be untrue.” A whole society, he wrote, can deceive itself “for an indefinite time,” and the only check on that mass delusion is that “sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality.” Science is one source of that solid reality. The Trump Administration seems determined to keep it at bay, and the consequences for society and the environment will be profound.

It is everyone who is concerned about our freedom, health, welfare, and security as a nation—and everyone who is concerned about the planetary legacy we leave for our children.

The wealthy, says Smith, spend their days establishing an “economy of greatness,” one founded on “luxury and caprice” and fueled by “the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires.” Any broader benefit that accrues from their striving is not the consequence of foresight or benevolence, but “in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity.” They don’t do good, they are led to it.

Smith described this state of affairs as “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty,” and he knew that it made for the revolutionary implication of his work. It shifted the way we thought about the relationship between government action and economic growth, making less means more the rebuttable presumption of policy proposals.

What it did not do, however, was void any proposal outright, much less prove that all government activity was counterproductive. Smith held that the sovereign had a role supporting education, building infrastructure and public institutions, and providing security from foreign and domestic threats — initiatives that should be paid for, in part, by a progressive tax code and duties on luxury goods. He even believed the government had a “duty” to protect citizens from “oppression,” the inevitable tendency of the strong to take advantage of the ignorance and necessity of the weak.

The fact that many of our self-protective delusions are built into the way the brain works is no justification for not trying to override them. Knowing how dissonance works helps us identify our own inclinations to perpetuate errors -- and protect ourselves from those who can’t. Or won’t.Related LinksWhat Historians Can Learn from the Social Sciences and Sciences /* * * CONFIGURATION VARIABLES: EDIT BEFORE PASTING INTO YOUR WEBPAGE * * */ var disqus_shortname = 'hnndev'; // required: replace example with your forum shortname /* * * DON'T EDIT BELOW THIS LINE * * */ (function() { var dsq = document.createElement('script'); dsq.type = 'text/javascript'; dsq.async = true; dsq.src = '//' + disqus_shortname + '.disqus.com/embed.js'; (document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(dsq); })(); Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. News Breaking News Historians DC Breaking News Historians DC ‘Scottsboro Boys’ pardoned in Alabama ‘November 22, 1963’ U-Boat discovered off the coast of Indonesia Vatican publicly unveils bone fragments said to belong to St. Peter Pictured: the 'real site' of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon Historian: Taiwan can use WWII legacy to improve standing with China 'I Take Long Walks': The Emotional Lives of Holocaust Scholars Chinese historian: Xi Jinping a master of "neo-authoritarianism" History Comes to Life With Tweets From Past Celtic Paths, Illuminated by a Sundial try{for(var lastpass_iter=0; lastpass_iter < document.forms.length; lastpass_iter++){ var lastpass_f = document.forms[lastpass_iter]; if(typeof(lastpass_f.lpsubmitorig2)=="undefined"){ lastpass_f.lpsubmitorig2 = lastpass_f.submit; lastpass_f.submit = function(){ var form=this; var customEvent = document.createEvent("Event"); customEvent.initEvent("lpCustomEvent", true, true); var d = document.getElementById("hiddenlpsubmitdiv"); for(var i = 0; i < document.forms.length; i++){ if(document.forms[i]==form){ d.innerText=i; } } d.dispatchEvent(customEvent); form.lpsubmitorig2(); } } }}catch(e){}

at last, history has gotten into bed with psychological science, and it’s a happy match. History gives us the data of, in Barbara Tuchman’s splendid words, our march of folly -- repeated examples of human beings unable and unwilling to learn from mistakes, let alone to admit them. Cognitive science shows us why

Our brains, which have allowed us to travel into outer space, have a whole bunch of design flaws, which is why we have so much breathtaking bumbling here on Earth.

the “demarcation problem,” the issue of what separates good science from bad science and pseudoscience (and everything in between). The problem is relevant for at least three reasons.

The first is philosophical: Demarcation is crucial to our pursuit of knowledge; its issues go to the core of debates on epistemology and of the nature of truth and discovery.

The second reason is civic: our society spends billions of tax dollars on scientific research, so it is important that we also have a good grasp of what constitutes money well spent in this regard.

Meeting Christopher after a long interval reminded me of his excellent book Living Philosophy: Reflections on Life, Meaning and Morality (2001). The volume includes a fascinating essay entitled ‘The Need to Sleep’, where he notes that philosophers have not paid sufficient attention to this extraordinary phenomenon. Well, a decade on, this is the beginning of a response to Christopher’s wake-up call.

If I told you that I had a neurological disease which meant that for eight or more hours a day I lost control of my faculties, bade farewell to the outside world, and was subject to complex hallucinations and delusions – such as being chased by a grizzly bear at Stockport Railway Station – you would think I was in a pretty bad way.

Of course, sleep is not a disease at all, but the condition of daily (nightly) life for the vast majority of us. The fact that we accept without surprise the need for a prolonged black-out as part of our daily life highlights our tendency to take for granted anything about our condition that is universal.

end-of-life dreams and visions (ELDVs) are an intrinsic and comforting part of the dying process

"the most common dreams and visions were of deceased relatives or friends." Dreams and visions about the deceased were "significantly more comforting" to patients than other kinds of ELDVs, and became more frequent as the person approached death

characterized by a consistent pattern of realism and emotional significance

A 'brain training' iPad game developed and tested by researchers at the University of Cambridge may improve the memory of patients with schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a long-term mental health condition that causes a range of psychological symptoms, ranging from changes in behaviour through to hallucinations and delusions

patients are still left with debilitating cognitive impairments, including in their memory

The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015&nbsp;Gallup&nbsp;survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn’t imagine life without the device.

So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?

Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.

In Haidt’s view, the philosophers’ dream of reason isn’t just naïve, it is radically unfounded, the product of what he calls “the rationalist delusion.” As he puts it, “Anyone who values truth should stop worshiping reason

According to Haidt, not only are value judgments less often a product of rational deliberation than we’d like to think, that is how we are supposed to function. That it is how we are hardwired by evolution. In the neuroscientist Drew Westen’s words, the political brain is the emotional brain.

Indeed, reason sometimes seems simply beside the point. Consider some of Haidt’s own well-known research on “moral dumbfounding.”

The physics of atoms and their ever-smaller constituents and cousins is, as Adam Becker reminds us more than once in his new book, “What Is Real?,” “the most successful theory in all of science.” Its predictions are stunningly accurate, and its power to grasp the unseen ultramicroscopic world has brought us modern marvels.

But there is a problem: Quantum theory is, in a profound way, weird. It defies our common-sense intuition about what things are and what they can do.

Indeed, Heisenberg said that quantum particles “are not as real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”

those of us who remain Christian — and yes, this is a Christmas column, U.F.O.s and all — can be agnostic about all these strange stories, not reflexively dismissive, since Christianity does not require that all paranormal experiences be either divinely sent or demonic or imaginary.

the Christian idea is that whatever capricious powers may exist, when the true God enters his creation, he does so honestly, straightforwardly, in a vulnerable and fully human form — and exposes himself publicly, whether in a crowded stable or on an execution hill. So the glamour of U.F.O.s, like the glamour of faerie, is an understandable object of curiosity but a dangerous object for any kind of faith. The only kind of God worth trusting is the kind who does not play tricks.

Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise—what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately-owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.

By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are perverting capitalism in a way that undermines personal freedom and corrodes democracy.

Under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption that prevailed for much of the twentieth century, industrial capitalism achieved a relatively benign balance among the contending interests of business owners, workers, and consumers. Enlightened executives understood that good pay and decent working conditions would ensure a prosperous middle class eager to buy the goods and services their companies produced. It was the product itself — made by workers, sold by companies, bought by consumers — that tied the interests of capitalism’s participants together. Economic and social equilibrium was negotiated through the product.

But possibly as&nbsp;concerning is&nbsp;the thing that we often do while we're sitting: Mindlessly scrolling through our social media feeds when we have a few spare minutes (or for some, hours)

It’s addictive

Experts have not been in total agreement on whether internet addiction is a real thing, let alone social media addiction, but there’s some good evidence that both may exist.

But an appeals court granted a stay of execution Tuesday, shortly after another appeals court lifted an Indiana judge’s ruling that found she was likely mentally ill and couldn’t comprehend she would be put to death.

But an appeals court granted a stay of execution Tuesday, shortly after another appeals court lifted an Indiana judge’s ruling that found she was likely mentally ill and couldn’t comprehend she would be put to death.

“I don’t believe she has any rational comprehension of what’s going on at all,” Henry said.