The Echoing Cave
How the stories we take in shape our beliefs of the world
Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.
This month we’re exploring the theme of Story.
Shadows dance across the cave wall. Prisoners sit and watch, believing what they witness before them is truth and reality.
This is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the questions it poses are questions we still ask today.
What is reality? How do I know what truth is? Will I break free or choose to remain? Will I live a life of reason?
The shadows show a story to the prisoners and that story forms their reality—the only world they know.
At the heart of every story is an idea. And as that idea grows, it has the ability to persuade its audience into action or inaction, whether it be physical, mental, or emotional.
Yes, stories are powerful forces that can make our lives better, but they can also hinder our lives and make it harder to discern reality,
All of our beliefs are rooted directly in story, whether it be stories passed down to us, those we come across on our own, or the ones we ourselves write.
Once these stories take hold, it becomes increasingly hard to rid ourselves of them or change our minds because, as Michael Shermer has pointed out, our, “belief systems are powerful, pervasive, and enduring.”
The Patternicity Problem
“Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.”
Michael Shermer has coined this pattern-seeking nature we possess patternicity—our innate ability to see something—an image, story, “truth”—in events based upon a pattern of knowledge.
Bread that looks like the face of Jesus
Believing there is some underlying logic to a coin flip
Drawing simplified conclusions to problems based upon coincidence and chance.
One reason we’re so inclined to believe these things is because we cannot comprehend the vast complexity of every day life. Our mind is much more inclined to accept a simplified story over the truth which is complicated and messy.
Conspiracy theories, for example, proliferate because of their ability to both simplify complex reality into easy to digest stories, and the fact that there are sometimes conspiracies which are true (such as Peter Thiel’s pursuit to take down Gawker).
As Shermer writes, “Because both history and current events are brimming with real conspiracies, I contend that conspiracism is a rational response to a dangerous world. Thus, in the common computer analog, it is a feature of—not a bug in—human cognition.”
We see patterns in the world based upon our experience and the knowledge we’ve gathered.
We like simple and fast answers to life’s questions, but as John Kaag has pointed out, “truth is not simply whatever is expedient.”
Sometimes to get down to the true story, we need to spend time investigating.
The Misinformation Problem
“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.”
We’re living in a time unlike any other, both for our advanced technical capabilities—something our ancestors of even 100 years ago could never have imagined—and our inability to distinguish fact from fiction.
As our lives have steadily moved from real life experiences to online ones, we’ve opened ourselves up to consuming more information, but without the guardrails that ensured information was truthful.
This is what made the web so appealing, it democratized information and discarded the gatekeepers.
The two main problems to this.
First, information used to be fact-checked and produced in a more digestible way. If the New York Times ran an inaccurate piece, it would be fact-checked and forced to be corrected.
But this is not the same today where misinformation is pumped out at the speed of light. Even if a correction was made, it’s too late, information spreads too quickly. Additionally, less people read fact-based news and prefer to get their news from social media, online personalities, and memes, none of which holds the same journalistic standards that had provided stability to information.
Secondly, one of our greatest skills is our ability to read people—their tone of voice, facial features, body language—and determine whether we believe them.
But as we progressed online, we lost this ability. One cannot determine truth from lie in the tiny features of a face through a screen. We’re now drinking from a firehose of information and don’t have an easy ability to determine if it is real or not.
This means we live a good majority of our lives in fiction. And as studies suggest, the more time we spend in fiction, regardless of its source, the more our brain’ neurons fire as though we were the ones experiencing the story we’re digesting rather than being an objective bystander.
Stories, whether it be through news, movies, books, or any other source type, wire the brain to feel as though we were in the story, and our body reacts to that. Our hearts race in horror movies, our anxiety spikes after watching Fox News or MSNBC, we become emotional watching Titanic.
Stories, whether true or false, envelope us in their world, and the more we immerse ourselves in them, the harder it is to tell fact from fiction.
Misbelief
“Misbelief is a distorted lens through which people begin to view the world, reason about the world, and then describe the world to others.”
Patternicity, conspiracy theories, and misinformation combine to create a life where the stories we’re told may not be true, but regardless, we begin to believe them.
This is what Dan Ariely calls Misbelief.
According to Ariely, misbelief is formed across four dimensions:
Emotional Elements - Emotions precede beliefs which drives action.
Cognitive Elements - We see information that answers our questions regardless of accuracy.
Personality Elements - Certain personality traits make people more susceptible to misbelief.
Social Elements - We’re social creatures and our sociability leads us to like-minded individuals.
“Misbelief is also a process—a kind of funnel that pulls people deeper and deeper,” Ariely writes.
Each of these four pillars can be found in either real life or online and they are more and more driving our beliefs and our actions.
The funnel of misbelief starts with questions—is the truth I have come to know real? This curiosity or skepticism is healthy and good, it forces us to want to find truth rather than just ingest what comes our way.
But during this phase, people tend to begin to loosen their reasoning abilities and allow the story of like-minded people to take hold. We see people going from believing in the medical community to believing every doctor is a charlatan and is there to take our money.
As we become entrenched in these new views, we have people who support us, further entrenching us in these new beliefs. We feel accepted. We begin doing more of our own research and questioning. We further entrench ourselves and now make it harder to change beliefs. We’ve got online communities who back us, we’ve publicly committed to certain beliefs, we’re locked in.
“Misbelief,” Ariely writes, “is about both the quantity of false beliefs a person holds and a general mindset of mistrust and suspicion.”
The stories we surround ourselves with quickly take hold and we allow them to guide our beliefs and then our actions.
Overcoming Story’s Obstacles and Taking Its Power Back
“The truth is sometimes brutal. Regardless of how much we conceal the truth, or pretend it is not so, the data are the data.”
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is about our ability to use reason to justify our actions and awaken us from the stories that bind us to the reality we know.
But our skepticism, the thing that would have helped us “wake up” from our inability to see truth, can go off the rails and be put in overdrive. As Ariely states, there is a tipping point where our “independent thinking” can become overactive and counterproductive.
We’ve all believed, for example, there is objective truth and we pursue this idea. But as it turns out, there really isn’t an objective truth, rather, there is something called “perspectivism”—the idea that the closest we can ever really get to the truth is through different perspectives.
Ed Yong opens his book, An Immense World, with a perfect example of this. Taking a single event and showing it through the perspective of multiple animals—a rat, spider, snake, mosquito, bee, bat, elephant, human, bird—he shows how each creature sees and interacts with the world differently.
“The robin's chest looks red to Rebecca [human] but not to the elephant, whose eyes are limited to shades of blue and yellow. The bumblebee can't see red, either, but it is sensitive to the ultraviolet hues that lie beyond the opposite end of the rainbow. The sunflower it sits upon has at its center an ultraviolet bullseye, which grabs the attention of both the bird and the bee. The bullseye is invisible to Rebecca, who thinks the flower is only yellow. Her eyes are the sharpest in the room; unlike the elephant or the bee, she can spot the small spider sitting upon its web. But she stops seeing much of anything when the lights in the room go out.”
So the best way to start taking back stories is by first remembering there are multiple perspectives to the story itself. Like in science, the stories we pursue need to be examined from multiple angles, pressure tested, and seen if they can stand the test of time.
Are there countering beliefs? Do those beliefs have enough logic and evidence to dethrone the other beliefs?
We must be comfortable changing our beliefs. Change can be scary but it also leads to growth.
William James summarized this train of thought when he wrote, we “have to live today by the truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.”
So you must ask yourself consistently with the stories you are ingesting, with the ones you are creating, with the ones you are repeating: is this moving me toward the cave entrance or entrenching me further in the cave?
Each of us has a decision to make about whether we wish to watch the puppets’ shadows dance upon the wall or escape and see reality for what it is. But it starts with recognizing the shadows for the false narratives they purport to tell of the world.
Michael Shermer once wrote he was a skeptic not because he didn’t want to believe, but rather, because he wanted to know.
We all would benefit from following a similar belief.
Before you go…
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Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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