Belief, Desire, and Cognitive Bias About the Future
The criminals facing imminent doom are willfully choosing to ignore their inevitable extinction. They don't need to believe in the future for it to mangle them.
I’ve been in the strategic intelligence business for around 25 years. When I started, I thought that facts dictated how leaders saw the future. I mean, if trends were inescapable, if the intelligence sources we had were high enough quality, and if the arguments were compelling enough, then a Change of Mind was surely inevitable! After all, we can’t just go around believing irrational things, now can we?
I have since matured. I now realize that cognitive bias is more popular than procrastination, infidelity, and carbohydrates combined. Whether it’s confirmation bias, normalcy bias, or another psychological distortion, believing something other than what is suggested by empirical evidence is more the rule than the exception.
And with the inevitable doom facing the world’s megacriminals, there is a global pandemic of cognitive bias in an attempt to look away from a most terrible fate ahead.
“Why would you want to believe it?”
I learned the most about the role of desire in foresight from a dying friend.
One of our roommates and closest friends back in Burlington, Vermont was the beautiful, cranky, fantastic Jerilyn Baker. She represented the Green Mountain spirit as good as maple syrup, cheddar cheese, and flannel combined. She also got struck with gastric cancer in her mid-20s. She didn’t outrun death for too long, but she sure looked it in the eye, growled, and spit at it. I’ve never seen anyone with better humor and less self-pity in the face of something so awful.
There was a bit of a miracle that occurred when they gave her about 24 hours to live. After the death sentence, she heard her friends were coming to visit. She perked right up, started eating, drinking wine, and watching X-Files reruns with us, all 80 pounds of her, just like a regular good old time. Never seen anything like it.
One thing was quite odd. Toward the end of the long weekend, she started worrying about her credit cards and how she was going to pay them off. This…was not one of her major problems, in everyone else’s view.
I asked a hospice worker friend about it, bewildered. She said, “Eric, why would you want to believe it?”
That made no sense to me. What did believing in the truth have to do with the truth? Everything, sometimes.
“Eric, she’s being robbed of her life just as it begins. Why would she want to truly believe that’s her fate? It’s not fair. It’s not nice. And she’s in no position to want to believe it.”
That cut through for me. Hell, I didn’t want to believe in a world where she’d be gone. So why should she?
And sure enough, if we both could have believed the world to be different and to keep her here, we would have. But reality called.
The future, sometimes no matter how terrible, does not need our permission to happen.
Happily, cognitive bias will not keep anyone’s ass out of prison
I’ve been writing on this Substack about the great many criminal and treasonous enterprises happening in Missouri, all of which are being targeted and systematically destroyed. Today, just up the road from my house, a Monsanto exec caught a Federal wire fraud charge, one that will help stop the hostile Chinese takeover of agribusiness. St. Louis family court lawyers are going to prison, court employees trafficking kids are going to prison, yet more St. Louis City Aldermen are catching Federal charges—the list goes on. And yet, so many of my neighbors are in the grip of normalcy bias, convinced that none of this will impact them and that nothing is truly changing despite every earth-shattering example to the contrary.
Neither the future, nor the Feds, care a whit about their denial.
As I have mentioned, the level of sheer criminality has risen to the point of national security threat. Whether it’s planning part of the January 6 attempted coup d’état here or messing around with the construction of a new intelligence agency, the status quo is not acceptable. Moreover, the pace and severity of the Federal prosecutions here are going to get more intense. No doubt Not Invented Here bias, survivorship bias, and plain old denial will be employed with equal intensity.
And yet, the Feds don’t care whether you believe in the handcuffs going on you during the early morning raid—the handcuffs are going on.
Child trafficking will not be allowed. Criminal-run courts will not be permitted. Taking bribes from drug traffickers ain’t gonna fly.
The future may be terrifying for some, but to them I simply say that they shouldn’t have committed so much crime and/or treason. And that I don’t feel the slightest bit of sympathy for them.