Stupidity vs. Malice: The Dangers of Belief

The Emperor has no clothes.  

And yet he was strutting about naked last week in my hometown of St. Louis, as a reported 20,000 young people thrilled at the Emperor’s New (Pretend) Wardrobe at the FOCUS Seek Conference, where Scott Hahn, Edward Sri, the Eminently Phony Fr. Mike Schmitz and others strutted their naked and exposed quasi-Pentecostal sanctimoniousness before adoring fan boys and fan girls who went all weak-in-the-knees over the invisible robes of royalty.

“Our culture is so broken, and there are so many people that have that brokenness. There’s so much hurt out there. I love this line from Pope Francis: ‘Relativism wounds people.’ It’s not just a bad idea, it ruins people’s lives. But they’re coming to find the truth in Jesus, that God is there in the midst of the suffering,” Sri said.

• Our culture is indeed broken, Edward Sri.  It is largely the Religious Right that has broken it.  Did you confront your hearers with that fact, Edward Sri?

• Relativism does indeed wound people.  Particularly the relativism of “your truth” vs. “my truth”: my election results, my conspiracy theories, my vaccine pseudoscience vs. your so-called “facts”.  Yes, Mr. Sri, the relativism that is ruining people’s lives is endemic to your listeners and their families.  Did you point that out to them this past weekend?

Of course not.  

These conferences are not about the Truth.  They’re about low-level scamming, grift not glory; they’re about milking the Catholic Ghetto, the Catholic cultural, intellectual and spiritual ghetto; they are self-congratulatory gatherings of Catholic Rock Stars, ginning up onanistic thrills from purity-obsessed college students and suburban Church Ladies in sterile convention centers.  These sorts of events are patently absurd to any outsider.  But they’re not meant for the outsiders; they’re meant for the ignorant - and perhaps culpably ignorant - insiders.  And these conferences will last, apparently, until the world ends.

As I wrote about last week, the world did not end on December 21, 1954, as the Chicagoland housewife who was receiving messages from space aliens had predicted.  (No, this was not a Catholic nutcase; she was not receiving messages from the Virgin Mary.  She WAS the Virgin Mary, reincarnated, or so the space aliens told her - naturally.)  But this woman had many minor failed predictions in the months prior to December of that year.

Leon Festinger, the main author of the study of this UFO Cult, When Prophecy Fails, calls these failed predictions “disconfirmations”.  There were many disconfirmations prior to and including the main disconfirmation when the world did not end on December 21, 1954.

For me, there were many disconfirmations of the trustworthiness of my fellow Catholics - and, frankly, of the entire Catholic system that enabled them - since my reception into the Church 24 years ago.  These disconfirmations included (but were not limited to) …

• The appalling Sex Abuse scandal, which I blogged about in detail back in the Day.  In many ways, this scandal culminated with the exposure of Cardinal McCarrick, whose story indicates how fully corrupt the clerical system was and still is.

• The way “conservative” Catholics treated me when I was blogging, either threatening me with physical violence or telling me I needed to “go to Confession”; and also the way the True Believers of false prophet Charlie Johnston continued to follow him, even after I demonstrated time and again the lies Johnston was telling.

• The dysfunctional people and families I kept coming in contact with in my Super Catholic circles (I spoke at and presented at many of these Seek-type conferences over the years, remember).  The more religious these people were, the more emotionally and intellectually unbalanced they were.  I took to saying, “Christians are just like everyone else; only worse” - not realizing how literally true this turned out to be.

• The refusal to mask or get vaccinated and the complaining about closing churches during COVID; the Epiphany Coup; support for Putin; support for the Orange Antichrist; the failure to condemn systemic racism; support for obvious lies in the face of contradictory evidence; the sometimes vocal antisemitism and support for Hitler; the denial of the evils of slavery - this all came out in my circle of Super Catholic friends since 2016; they went from sheepishly and tentatively endorsing such idiocy, to vehemently and proudly proclaiming it from the housetops, much to my astonishment; this was, in short, the Great Unmasking.

The first and last items on that list were disconfirmations for everybody.  Not everybody was involved enough in Catholic media to get pushback, as I was; and, to be fair, not everybody read the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report or the details of the Bishop Finn case or, for that matter, have bothered to find out how horrific January 6 really was.  So not everybody experienced all of the disconfirmations I did.

But when does this move from mere ignorance to culpable ignorance?  When does this move from stupidity to malicious intent?

But first, a blast from the past …

PLEASE MAKE A DIFFERENCE

The President of Procter & gamble appeared on the Phil Donahue Show on March 1, 1994. He announced that due to the openness of our society, he was coming out of the closet about his association with the church of Satan. He stated that a large portion of his profits from Procter & Gamble Products goes to support this satanic church. When asked by Donahue if stating this on t.v. would hurt his business, he replied, “THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH CHRISTIANS IN THE UNITED STATES TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.”

That’s as pure a distillation as you will ever find of the nightmares and bogeymen that terrify the religious right, complete with the attempt to justify those fears because those people [who are opposed to them] are really Satan-worshipping baby-killers.

So writes Fred Clark here and here of the strange urban legend that sprang up about Proctor and Gamble a generation or two ago.  He says a few things that I’m going to summarize below.

Clark carried around a dossier that he would present to his Evangelical friends who believed this obvious nonsense.  He showed them the proof - denials from Proctor and Gamble, from the Donahue Show (on which the CEO of P&G never appeared), and evidence that the P&G logo was not (as the conspiracists claimed) filled with satanic symbols.

Their reaction?  They doubled down on their belief in the rumor and became angry at him - at the truth teller, the messenger Fred Clark.

Because for the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes to be more realistic, when the little boy exclaims, “But he’s naked!”, the crowd would “turn and rend him” limb from limb.  That’s how the parable would actually end - with a bloodbath and with a rejection of Cognitive Dissonance by the True Believers.

Why would this disconfirmation not work?  Clark at first thought it was mere stupidity.  That seems to be the answer for the “Seekers”, the UFO Cult that Leon Festinger writes about.  They seem abysmally stupid - even though some of them were doctors, college professors and scientists.

But Clark rejects this.  It’s not stupidity that makes the True Believers reject factual evidence.  It’s not stupidity or foolishness that makes them immune to disconfirmation.

Clark writes …

In trying to combat the P&G slander with nothing more than irrefutable facts proving it false, I was operating under a set of false assumptions. Among these:

1. I assumed that the people who claimed to believe that Procter & Gamble supported the Church of Satan really did believe such a thing.

2. I assumed that they were passing on this rumor in good faith — that they were misinforming others only because they had, themselves, been misinformed.

3. I assumed that they would respect, or care about, or at least be willing to consider, the actual facts of the matter.

4. Because the people spreading this rumor claimed to be horrified/angry about its allegations, I assumed that they would be happy/relieved to learn that these allegations were, indisputably, not true.

All of those assumptions proved to be false. All of them. This was at first bewildering, then disappointing, and then, the more I thought about it, appalling — so appalling that I was reluctant to accept that it could really be the case.

But it is the case. Let’s go through that list again. The following are all true of the people spreading the Procter & Gamble rumor:

1. They didn’t really believe it themselves.

2. They were passing it along with the intent of misinforming others. Deliberately.

3. They did not respect, or care about, the actual facts of the matter, except to the extent that they viewed such facts with hostility.

4. Being told that the Bad Thing they were purportedly upset about wasn’t real only made them more upset. Proof that the 23rd largest corporation in America was not in league with the Devil made them defensive and very, very angry.

Again, I’m not happy to be saying such things about anyone, and I’m only doing so here reluctantly, yet this is the appalling truth.

Clark goes on to say …

I used to believe that maybe some people were that stupid. They were acting that stupid, so I went along. I believed that the people I was sending that dossier to were merely innocent dupes.

But in truth they were neither innocent nor dupes. The category of innocent dupe does not apply here. No one could be honestly misled by such a story. The only way to have been misled by it is dishonestly — which is to say deliberately, willingly and willfully. They are claiming to believe a foolish thing, but they are not guilty of foolishness. They are guilty of malice.

They are just plain guilty.

He points out that the rumor was given a boost by the several distributors of the MLM monster Amway, against whom P&G won a multi-million dollar lawsuit.  Illegitimate Amway wanted to disparage and damage their legitimate rival P&G, so much of the impetus behind this satanic panic stems from deliberate disinformation and mere greed - in the same way that the greed of professional media grifters are behind the disinformation that the Religious Right willingly gobbles up from FOX News and elsewhere.

But of course that’s not the whole story.  We can understand greed and lying.  What we cannot understand is the willingness to believe the lies peddled by greedy liars.

Clark goes on to analyze what’s behind this eager gullibility.

He compares it to something similar to a satanic panic, back in the day: the righteous indignation against Kitten Burners.  For a while, newspapers were reporting on isolated incidents of boys burning kittens for sport.  Newspapers took a “courageous stand” in editorializing against Kitten Burning.  How brave of them!

(One of my Theater of the Word actors once bravely and courageously put together a show that he wanted to tour to schools, a show on bullying.  “For or against?” I asked him.)

But something odd happened in response to these editorials and stories about Kitten Burning.

That same posturing resurfaced in a big way earlier this year [2016] when the kitten-burners struck again, much closer to home. A group of disturbed and disturbing children doused a kitten with lighter fluid and set it on fire just a few miles from the paper’s offices.

The paper covered the story, of course, and our readers ate it up.

People loved that story. It became one of the most-read and most-e-mailed stories on our Web site. Online readers left dozens of comments and we got letters to the editor on the subject for months afterward.

Those letters and comments were uniformly and universally opposed to kitten-burning. Opinion on that question was unanimous and vehement.

But here was the weird part: Most of the commenters and letter-writers didn’t seem to notice that they were expressing a unanimous and noncontroversial sentiment. Their comments and letters were contentious and sort of aggressively defensive. Or maybe defensively aggressive. They were angry, and that anger didn’t seem to be directed only at the kitten-burners, but also at some larger group of others whom they imagined must condone this sort of thing.

Similarly, you cannot simply oppose Democrats for their public policies.  You must spread the word that they are engaged in sex trafficking of children, that they then kill the children they’ve victimized and drink their blood to stay eternally young.  (If the CEO of Proctor and Gamble knows about this, I’m sure he’s in on it; the DeVos family of Amway is, at least, that’s for sure.)

As Arthur Miller pointed out many years after writing The Crucible, which was an allegory of sorts about McCarthyism, there were indeed some witches in Salem; there were indeed some communists in Hollywood and, it seems, there are indeed some kids who burn kittens - but "Salem...had taught me...that a kind of built-in pestilence has nestled in the human mind," Arthur Miller said.

Comet Ping Pong may not have a basement where children are kept prisoner; but the human mind has a cellar that is abysmally deep and full of very dark things.