As I write this, it is the day after Apple TV’s new adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation epic – stories of the far future, when humanity is sprinkled among the stars in a vast Galactic Empire – has debuted for all the world to see. Foundation, an epic I have loved since I was a young teenager, where worlds collide, humanity stumbles, and the future course of civilization is at stake.
There are two groups dedicated to humanity’s salvation – the Foundation and the Second Foundation. The first is a growing political and economic power in the galaxy, while the second is clandestine. The first loathes the second and wishes to eradicate it. As events unfold, the Second Foundation manages to convince the original Foundation that they have, indeed, been vanquished – while, in truth, they remain.
Asimov names the penultimate chapter of his novel Second Foundation “The Answer That Satisfied”, in which the original Foundation is convinced; the final chapter, “The Answer That Was True”, explains to the reader what really happened.
You have all that is wrong and broken in modern politics – well, in human history, really – right there in those two chapter titles.
When human beings are making a decision – to act, to believe or not believe something they are seeing or hearing, to take on new information as the truth – we like to believe we are doing so because our reason tells us to, or because we feel ourselves to be skilled in discerning what’s real and what isn’t.
But neuropsychologists have made clear in recent years, by watching our brain activity when we’re deciding things, that this isn’t what’s happening at all. More often than not, we are deciding things or accepting things that drift over our transom based not on how much sense they make, but on how they make us feel.
Elsewhere, we’ve called this the Dopamine Ding – the little pleasurable impulse we feel that guides us to “rightness”. When we hear the Dopamine Ding, our “rightness” alarm is telling us that whatever it is we’re thinking about is “correct” - we can safely accept it.
This is problematic in so many ways that it’s hard to know where to begin. So let’s just dive in and work our way backwards.
For starters, the Dopamine Ding is easy to manipulate. Those who would deceive us – from lecterns, pulpits, and the rear platforms of choo-choo trains – have long understood that they can make us ding over their ideas by attaching their ideas to one of our ideas. Example: by telling us that Mexicans are sneaking across the border to rape our women and take our jobs, a politician can convince us to fear Mexicans – by attaching the ding of our real fears, rape and joblessness, to something else. The fact that it isn’t even remotely true gets jumped right over; the politician has gotten us to ding for his agenda by exploiting another ding altogether.
Making us afraid of things that aren’t really dangerous is a masterful mind control tool, because fear is such a strong motivator. Politicians and preachers across the centuries have perfected this technique; we see it in the most ancient of writings.
And it underscores the unfortunate truth that our brains say Yes to what seems right to our emotions, rather than what our minds might true to say.
We are, of course, trained to perpetuate this dysfunction. “Go with your gut!”, we’re often told, as obviously foolish as experience has taught us this can be. We are urged to listen to some inner voice that will guide us to the truth, and this almost always turns out badly for us.
This isn’t to say that somethings our instincts and intuitions aren’t correct; there are times when they are. But these are the exceptions that prove the rule, and our error is in not taking the trouble to determine when this works and when it doesn’t.
We can get to the truth of this fastest by realizing that the Dopamine Ding originated in a Paleolithic past when decisions and truths were found (and needed to be acted upon) in the moment; when there was no such thing as abstraction, and the ding was a survival tool – listen to it and live! But in the modern here-and-now, such moments are almost non-existent; we have the time and luxury of contemplation in almost every situation where we need to take the time to evaluate new information or consider recent events, and decide what to take on board and what to reject.
The gold standard here, of course, is Science. Scientists are trained from every intro course to set their ding aside, to understand that the standard of truth to which they must adhere does not contain any ding whatsoever, and that when they do feel such a ding (and scientists, being human, naturally do experience emotional dings that tell them things are true or not), it is their duty to completely ignore the ding and stick with the measures of truth they’ve been trained up on.
If a scientist feels a ding over a particular argument or result, their next step is to do everything in their power to prove it wrong. They have an obligation, in fact, to mercilessly assault their own sense of “rightness” in pursuit of a standard of truth that will transcend everyone’s ding. They are, in fact, tasked with re-training their brains to deliver a Dopamine Ding only when that highest standard of truth has been objectively satisfied.
Those on the Left, most of whom embrace Science, like to believe that it is only those on the Right who chase after their emotionally satisfying dings, truth be damned; but this is self-deception on a mammoth scale. All of us are subject to the lure of accepting an emotionally satisfying answer over an objectively provable one. If the Left wants to stand beside Science, its constituents must re-train their Dopamine Ding as scientists themselves do.
In Second Foundation, the original Foundation is convinced that the Second Foundation has been eradicated when 50 “spies” of the Second Foundation are routed and executed. This very emotional outcome is compelling evidence that the threat has been eliminated. That was “The Answer That Satisfied”.
In fact, the 50 agents were volunteer martyrs of the Second Foundation, given us to elicit the Dopamine Ding in the minds of the first Foundation’s leadership. The Second Foundation lives on, now secured by the false sense of security inculcated in the other that they no longer exist. That’s “The Answer That Was True”.
The lesson: if we can’t get from The Answer That Satisfies to The Answer That’s True – we're living in a fantasy. We’ve allowed ourselves to disconnect from what’s real.
Is that really what we want?
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