The Science of Discworld IV

entry into belief systems was distinctly more successful. Few scientists would agree with his claim that Dianetics was a science, but it sold a lot of books; he had audiences of thousands, and after the editor John W. Campbell described it in
Astounding Science Fiction
it really took off. Martin Gardner’s claim that science fiction fans were very gullible seems to have been true. However, in the longer term Dianetics failed, and Hubbard produced Scientology, which has gone from strength to strength on the basis of a set of beliefs not very different from those of Dianetics.
    Basically, the idea is that a set of ‘engrams’ is induced in people by their experiences (including when they were an embryo, before the nervous system develops). Engrams are records of bad experiences, especially very bad ones, which have to be erased for people to become clears – a step upwards on the evolutionary ladder from ordinary humans. People have souls, thetans, that have jumped from alien to alien over billions of years. The important issue for questions about belief is that this system derived from the imagination of one man, who failed to sell Dianetics. It now has tens of thousands of adherents, at least; it claims millions.
    These are just three examples. Here are some others to consider, since people seem to pick up sets of beliefs terribly easily.
    Rosicrucians, for instance, believe that a set of mystical instructions will enable them to achieve telepathy, success in their jobs and instantaneous travel anywhere, including other planets. The cost of this instruction is considerable, but eventually it gets you into the central core of the sect, where anything is possible. Atlanteans believe that every so often the Earth tilts, flooding all the present continents and exposing new ones; if you find an Atlantean, note where he buys his next house. There are hundreds of such belief systems, and the people who subscribe to them – often paying large sums of money –get all kinds of benefits, especially being privy to the real truth about life, the universe, and everything.
    Other belief systems are not so wild. We have in mind systems like Count Alfred Korzybski’s general semantics, which produced wise little gems like ‘the map is not the territory’, Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s general system theory, and the many systems of mind training such as Esalen, with which Gregory Bateson was associated. There are thousands of ‘mind training’ hits on Google, most of them based in California. It is easy to understand the feelings, the beliefs, that send people into these systems of self-improvement. We subscribe to some ourselves – devotion to explanations involving ‘complexity’, promoted by the Santa Fe Institute for Complex Systems and the New England Complex Systems Institute (whose acronym, NECSI, has enabled Jack to promote himself as a necsialist, if not quite a nexialist fn1 ).
    However, the variety of these beliefs – most of which seem very strange to outsiders – is amazing. How can so many belief systems, differing so radically from the common experience of humanity, be accepted by so many people? For each individual belief system, the majority of us consider at least some of the beliefs to be absurd. So why is the absurdity not apparent to everyone? Can it be that people in general are so ignorant of reality nowadays that they will buy into anything that promises a better or more interesting life?
    There was also a system advertised not that long ago which forecast that 2012 would be a year of financial collapse
and
the beginning of World War III – which wouldn’t of itself have been a great surprise given some of the conflicts. However, the forecast was based on rather strange reasoning: not as a result of the antics of greedy bankers and the armaments industry, but because the ancient Mayan calendar ran out in 2012. fn2 The Mayans themselves mostly ran out inthe 1600s, because of the diseases which the Spaniards brought, not because of Spanish military prowess. So it’s difficult to see what their calendar had to do with us. The calendars on many kitchen walls this year – and most years – run out on 31 December … Hallelujah! It’s the apocalypse!
    In 2012
Scientific American
fn3 reported a psychological study carried out by Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, under the title ‘How critical thinkers lose their faith in God’. It was a follow-up to a 2011 investigation by Harvard researchers, who