Whaddaya know, doc? Dead men DO bleed.

[calimac]

What happens to a doomsday cult when the world doesn't end? This article says they mostly decide that their efforts to warn everybody about it warded it off. That doesn't seem too applicable in this case, though human ingenuity may be up to it. It also gives Biblical support for the logical chop that if a prophecy doesn't come true, then its promulgator wasn't a prophet. Mass abandonment of their leader sounds even less likely in this case.

There should have been more about the Millerites and their Great Disappointment as they called it. The Millerites were the most striking previous American example of a large cult of people who sold all their belongings and waited on a hill for the millennium to arrive. This was in 1843. When it didn't, they pushed the date forward by months a few times, and eventually concluded that it must have been a heavenly event rather than an earthly one, or something.

The article does refer to the psychologist who studied the attempt to reconcile firm beliefs with inconvenient facts and coined the term "cognitive dissonance" to describe it. Even without millennarianism, one finds such self-deluding going on in everyday life. My favorite example comes from my adolescence, from the brief period when I was following baseball. Those who know me may be surprised that I ever did, but you try living in a house with three brothers who are baseball-obsessed and not pick up something about it.

Our team was the San Francisco Giants, and after a few fairly hopeful years, their manager appeared to have gone mad and started trading off his best players, mostly for what seemed an endless series of mediocre left-handed pitchers. I expostulated over the obvious harm to the team, but my eldest brother said no, there was method in this, the manager knew what he was doing.

We went around on this a few times, and finally I said, "The way things are going, he'll trade off Willie McCovey for a mediocre left-handed pitcher." Willie McCovey was their best player and the star of the team. There's now a statue of him outside the stadium, even though he's still alive. I said, "If he does that, then will you admit he's crazy?"

My brother said, "Come on, he'd never trade McCovey."

I said, "Well, what if he did? Would you admit it?"

My brother said, "Well, that would be crazy. But that's why he won't do it, so it doesn't matter."

Then, whaddaya know, doc: just like I predicted, the manager traded McCovey for a mediocre left-handed pitcher. And I said to my brother, "See?" And he still wouldn't admit it. Oh, there was method in the madness and so on.

Soon afterwards, the team fired the crazy manager, and I see from the Wikipedia articles that the whole campaign of trading off the best players is now considered a serious blot in Giants history. So the casual uninformed observer was right, and my brother, more learned in baseball lore, well, he had faith.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Examples of such faith could be found in politics as well, on both the left and the right. Doris Lessing writes movingly of the period in British history where the revelations about Stalin came out, and people in the Communist Party were clinging to their belief in the Soviet Union and shunning their former friends who had heard more than they could endure.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"I was a bloody little fool of a leftie who went on being one not only after asking 'What would happen if somebody voted against Stalin?' and being given the answer 'But who would ever want to?' but after deciding that that answer would not do." - Kingsley Amis

But what Amis meant by "a leftie" was not limited to Communism but being anywhere left of center at all, and by the time he wrote this, he had become such an encrusted Tory that he even felt obliged to tout Margaret Thatcher as the most physically beautiful woman he'd ever known.

So, while it's true that it's pathetic to stick doggedly to undercut beliefs, just as common is to react to extremism not with sanity but with the equal and opposite extremism. Amis is one example; there are others.

And then there are those who admit that their beliefs of a lifetime were wrong, but fail to acknowledge the tremendous harm their implementation of those beliefs caused, and then show they never really absorbed the retraction anyway. They just come across as criminally stupid.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

An interesting set of choices. Do you have any examples of movement in the other direction, from right-wing lunacy to left-wing lunacy? You probably are better acquainted with the left end of the spectrum than I am. Are there any former right-wingers you wish would go back?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

They tend not to be political figures, but cultural ones. People with repressed childhoods who go wild with permissivism. Later on, though, they tend to sober up, so I see them as swinging pendulums that eventually come to rest, rather than magnetized bugs that jump from clinging one side to the other.