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Belief

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Shadowfacts 2025-02-01 12:07:00 -05:00
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```
title = "Belief"
tags = ["politics"]
date = "2025-02-01 12:00:42 -0500"
short_desc = "I need you to believe that there are right things and that there are wrong things."
slug = "belief"
```
I do not pretend to know fully understand how this came to be the case, or what to do about it, but I am increasingly of the opinion that the single most pressing problem of the American polity is that of amorality. Not immorality, _amorality_. It is not the case that we collectively believe what we are doing to be wrong—or believe it to be right; we simply do not care.
We are too eager to look for a way out of a hard situation, too eager to just do the easy thing, too happy to cast out of our minds what does not directly affect us (or what we want to believe will not directly affect us).
<!-- excerpt-end -->
See, for example:
1. The Fourth Estate rolling over when faced with a protection racket.
2. Hospitals abandoning caring for trans and pregnant patients.
3. Too much of legal academia being willing to carry water for abhorrent positions (e.g., the birth and slow mainstreaming of the atextual and ahistorical opposition to birthright citizenship).
4. The Harris campaign being unwilling to shift from Biden on any major issues.
5. Merrick Garland preserving norms at the Justice Department.
6. Democrats in general continuing to try and do politics as normal.
This is not an exhaustive list; you could surely add more.
Take just one of those, for example. If you were to get in a room with the executives at Paramount contemplating settling Trump’s 60 Minutes lawsuit, and wave a magic wand to get them to bare their souls—or if some alien could examine their innermost thoughts—I think that they would profess their belief that a free and independent press is integral to a well-functioning society. It is such a core part of the American mythos that there is little doubt in my mind that those Paramount executives do not think they believe it is the case.
But, I would posit that to believe something is to act in accordance with it. A professed belief with which you do not act in accordance is not something you actually believe.
> The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.
>
> — Douglas Adams, <em>Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency</em>
I believe that there are right things and that there are wrong things. And I fervently believe it is incumbent upon each of us to do what we believe is right, even when (or, perhaps, especially when) doing so comes at a personal cost. I only wish that I knew how to instill those values into a culture.
Inextricably bound up in all this is the notion that conservatives are unreachable because ["I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people"](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/i-dont-know-how-to-explain-to-you-that-you-should_b_59519811e4b0f078efd98440). Caring about what happens to other people has the necessary condition of believing that there are right things and wrong things. If you do not believe that, then all that matters—and all that _can_ matter—is whether something that happens is good for you or bad for you.
For example: conservatives not caring about abortion until someone close to them needs one. If you do not believe that there are right things and wrong things—if you do not believe that pregnant women dying of sepsis in hospital parking lots is a wrong thing, then until the pregnant woman dying of sepsis in a hospital parking lot is your wife or your daughter, it simply does not matter.
I need you to _believe_ that there are right things and that there are wrong things.