David Breeden is speaking all week about Naive Optimism

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden. I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we’ve been considering the ideas of naïve optimism and the truth shall set you free. What are the differences and what’s the reality of all of this? Naive optimism, just as a reminder, is the belief that your chances are always better than 50/50. We’ve been bouncing that off against a very old idea. Veritas liberabit vos: “The truth shall set you free” a saying of Jesus that’s reported in the Gospel according to John. Well, how does this comport with the idea that naïve optimism is good for you? Well, that’s always been a good question. Here’s just the opposite meme. The strongest weapon in the world is truth because truth is indestructible. Well, that’s a very nice thing to think. But is it true? Here we have a poor fellow handing to a woman he is about to date, apparently, a bouquet of flowers, to which he says, “Here I found some beautiful things and killed them so you can watch them decay.” Well, yep that’s one way to look at the situation of handing someone’s beautiful bouquet of flowers. Is it perhaps the best way to express this particular truth? Also, we have to keep in mind always an idea that is fairly recent in the psychological literature and in studies that are going on, something called the illusory truth effect. The more you hear it, the more you believe it, even if it’s false. So the illusory truth effect, something becomes true because it is endlessly repeated. Also, another part of the illusory truth effect is that, even though, after we hear it over and over again, we take it on as truth if it is easier for us to process, because it already fits into our world views. So the illusory truth effect, it is a real thing. Here we have Donald Trump talking with the philosopher Plato. Donald Trump is saying, “But surely you agree that truth can be created by the repetition of a lie?” Well, Plato wouldn’t agree with that, but Plato didn’t know about the illusory truth effect. And so Plato would be confused by what’s going on in our world today. He didn’t know the psychology as well as we do. Here is some research by Dr. Patrick R. Heck, who says, “65% of Americans believe they are above average in intelligence: Results of two nationally representative surveys.” The abstract from this research is, “Psychologists often note that most people think they are above average in intelligence. We sought robust contemporary evidence of this “smarter than average” effect by asking Americans in two independent samples …whether they agreed with the statement, “I am more intelligent than the average person. After weighing each sample to match the demographics of U.S. Census data, we found that 65% of Americans believe they are smarter than average, with men more likely to agree than women. However, overconfident beliefs about one’s intelligence are not always unrealistic: More educated people were more likely to think their intelligence is above average. We suggest that a tendency to overrate one’s cognitive abilities may be a stable feature of human psychology.” Meaning, yeah, we all think we’re a little bit above average, sometimes at least, don’t wait. And I’ve been bouncing that off against an idea that Friedrich Nietzsche had in the last two centuries ago in the 80s from his famous book, The Gay Science. In The Gay Science, he is leading up to the argument that God is dead and we have killed him.