Speaking to the MAGA cult of election deniers about the effort to justify vote suppression tactics by the GQP, Mike Johnson, in capacity as — surreal as it seems — Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives, uttered this self-demeaning statement:

We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number.

In other words, “We have absolutely no evidence to support this soundly discredited conspiracy theory, but we’re going to go right on pretending we do.” Who needs facts? We got intuition!

At about the same time, several Fox “News” personalities, in response to statistics showing that crime had plunged dramatically in recent months (statistics which, some have falsely suggested, are inaccurate because of under-reporting), declared that this can’t possibly be true, because they just don’t “feel” safer. Clearly, their feelings don’t care about your facts.

Fervent belief rules the world. And maintaining fervent belief requires a total willingness to ignore, discard and suppress facts. It even requires a willingness to engage in beliefs that contradict each other — especially evident among conspiracy theorists (a topic we’ll be examining in the near future). For example, research has shown that individuals who believe Osama bin Laden was already dead at the time his compound was raided are also more likely to believe that he is still alive. Presumably at the same time.

This proclivity for self-contradiction is constantly in evidence among conservatives: “gun control doesn’t work”, and yet it if it hadn’t been for supposed Nazi gun control, the Jews could have defended themselves against the Holocaust; Christians are the most heavily persecuted and oppressed minority in the country, yet they are a commanding majority whose every whim ought to be the law of the land; transgenders are too small a contingent to be given consideration, but they are everywhere, and totally overwhelming the country; a fertilized ovum is a human being, and yet personhood is defined by a soul distinct from the physical form; we should be proud and worshipful of the accomplishments of the nation’s founders, but reparations for slavery would be unfair because we had nothing to do with it; the Jan. 6 insurrection was actually just a peaceful protest, but it was a violent mob of BLM and antifa activists, but Former Guy should pardon them because they’re innocent political prisoners; liberals are the real fascists, but they’re also communists; America is a unique and omnipotent nation because God watches over it and protects it, but godless commies have totally taken control; America is perfect, and anybody who criticizes it is unpatriotic, but it’s also an apocalyptic hellhole in dire need of rescue and restoration; a twelve-year-old girl is old enough to be mother to a rapist’s baby, but not old to read about how to prevent becoming a mother; refusing to overturn an election is discarding the votes of 74 million people, but overturning it would not be discarding the votes of 81 million people; the Democratic Party that gave us the Confederacy is the same Democratic Party we have today, but keep your hands off OUR Confederate monuments.

Workers at abortion clinics have commented that some of the most vocal and obnoxious “pro-life” demonstrators will nonetheless come into the clinic to obtain their own abortions. Then go right back outside to denounce the whole business as the work of Satan.

As you can see, a great many passionate beliefs make no sense. According to behavioral experts, True Believers ultimately don’t even care if their beliefs have any truth to them. What’s important is that the beliefs establish their membership in a tribe — often, ironically, while, giving them the illusion that they are independent-thinking mavericks. And I would add that all too often, those beliefs are cudgels against The Others.

It’s very trendy these days to scoff at experts; you’ll not infrequently hear that “listening to the experts is what got us into this”. Aside from the vagueness of what “this” is, there is the implication that we instead should listen to alternate “experts” who somehow know more than the expert experts. Who are they? And how do they acquire their expertise? By intuition? What kind of “this” are they going to lead us into?How long until you start distrusting them as well, and seek out alternate alternate “experts”? Even if you don’t listen to anyone at all (a virtual impossibility), then you’re presuming to be your own “expert” in every conceivable field. That requires some very powerful intuition indeed.

You might be tempted to ask what the world is coming to when we have so many people in positions of power and influence who are so addicted to impassioned and irrational belief — and who make those beliefs the basis of public policy. But the thing is, this is really nothing the least bit new. Passionate belief, utterly untethered to reality or rationalism, has always ruled the world.

Katherine Rundell’s book Superinfinite: the Transformations of John Donne is not only an intriguing biography of the Sixteenth Century British metaphysical poet, but it also offers some illuminating glimpses into the faith-obsessed era in which he lived. Three little details in particular that she mentions are strikingly memorable and edifying.

First, it was a common belief of the time that tobacco could ward off the plague. Consequently, schoolboys could be flogged for not smoking. This simply reflects the dominant mode of thinking for most of human history: assume a belief, with scant or no evidence to back it up, cling to it tenaciously without subjecting it to empricial testing, and subject other people to it to the greatest extent possible.

It’s a mode of thinking that has led to a great deal of harm and misery for a great many people. In addition to putting schoolboys at risk for cancer and creating a false sense of security about the risk of plague, it has produced other atrocities such as physicians bleeding patients to treat illness, and the presumption of ethnic superiority to justify slavery — Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens even declared that anyone who could not see the obvious truth that his own race was superior was obviously insane. And it’s a mode of thinking that a great many people want to plunge the world into even more deeply.

The second item of note from the book concerns how those schoolboys spent their leisure time. One thing they liked to do was play in church buildings when services were not in progress. During the winter, they would urinate on the floor and let it freeze, then skate on it. Apparently, church officials were quite aware of this, and made no effort to stop it.

Can you imagine kids today getting away with anything like that? And yet they did it with impunity in an age of iron-fisted discipline. Today, the very idea of pissing on a church floor would be considered inexcusable sacrilege. But it was no big deal in an era when a schoolteacher was burned at the stake for the “heresy” of decorating his walls with the Ten Commandments. The moral here, once again, is that there is no consistency among True Believers about their beliefs and how they apply them; and, furthermore, different believers can apply wildly different standards to how they interpret and act upon the same belief — especially believers in different historical eras.

The third and most fascinating tidbit concerns how certain Christians who wanted to die chose to fulfill that wish. Fearing to commit suicide because they believed it would condemn them to eternal damnation, they hit upon a brilliant solution: murder a baby. That baby would not go to hell, because it was too young to have been corrupted by the evil world; the killer would be executed, but first he’d have time to repent, and thus go to heaven where, presumably, he could apologize to the angel infant. Voila, mission accomplished.

The first thing that grabs your attention about this is the sheer evil of a system that stigmatizes suicide, thereby further traumatizing the loved ones of the suicidal. To an extent, this paradigm still carries over to the present day. Suicide is still illegal in some places; and there are no doubt some people who, if they had their way, would make it punishable by the death penalty. Suicide seems to be (though it really isn’t) the ultimate act of autonomy; and autonomy is the biggest threat to radical ideologues.

Then there’s the contradiction of believing that (a) we are all born sinners and must repent of being born in order to attain salvation, yet (b) a baby would be spared because it’s too young to have been corrupted yet. If we are born evil, then of course an infant is just as evil as a centenarian. But who needs logic or consistency when you have ideology.

And then there’s the third point about this item: the way it hinges on the belief in the supremacy of belief. In fundamentalist dogma, faith is the one thing that distinguishes the good from the evil. If you are a believer, you go to heaven; if you are not, you go to hell. It’s all or nothing. Thus, you could be a Hitler your entire life, and as long as you repent with your last breath, you will live a blissful existence for all eternity. And you could be a Gandhi your entire life, but unless you repent — for, um, something or other — you will be condemned to eternal torment. It’s a worldview that actually renders morality moot, because ultimately no deeds matter except the act of repentance.

This is the kind of logic that rules the world. And always has. What’s different about the present age is that technology gives us an unprecedented ability to propagate, standardize and accelerate the insanity. But it also gives us the unprecedented tools to counter it with facts and reason. So take heart. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a ray of hope that civilization eventually will pull itself up out of the muck of lemming-like conviction.

If not, we at least can enjoy the fruits of the folly by visiting Las Vegas. Every light there is paid for by someone who passionately believed they could beat the house.