Abduction - Part IV

The question with which I concluded my last post was why. Why do people believe manifest nonsense, utter falsehoods that flagrantly violate the evidence of their own senses? That can't, surely, be the result of sociobiology. It's hard to see the evolutionary value in denying that there's a sabertooth tiger at the door of your cave, because you've been told by Ugh, the troglodytic village elder, that there's no such thing as tigers, or that if you pay him a fee for a magical amulet, the tiger will simply go away. Cavepeople who believed that tended not to live long enough to pass on their genes.

The reason is that we've all been conditioned, deliberately, systematically, consciously and unconsciously, by the ambient belief structure of our culture, by the formal and informal "educational" systems thereof, and even more by the ubiquitous delivery of false and perniciously deceptive messages by our various and proliferating media, 24/7.

If it hadn't been sufficiently obvious to begin with, I would have arrived at this conclusion by abduction: in this case, a kind of meta-abduction because it yields a conclusion about people's methods of arriving at conclusions: specifically, that they've been inculcated with the propensity to rely on "received truths," and discouraged from resorting to analytical thought. And also discouraged, when those "received truths" contradict the evidence of their own senses, from believing in what they can observe. This is a plausible and probable antecedent for the observable consequent circumstance that people believe nonsensical untruths which a) do them harm, and b) advantage the powerful interests that incessantly promulgate those untruths.