By Faith Alone

The Core of All Things

The Internet being in its usual state of constant war, chaos, and everyone being wrong according to everyone else is nothing new. When you get down to specifics, however, the war of all against all, with new ideas and sides constantly appearing, there is one theme I’d like to point to as something interesting – the “return to faith” trend – which I define as a remystification/rewilding of people’s mental models of the world. People rediscovering or returning to Christianity or Catholicism, hopping to the Eastern Orthodox Church belong to this trend. Paranormal fads like cryptids and remote viewing (CIA-sponsored!) have been investigated, even instigated by governments. Look at Project MKUltra, or the US Department of Defense’s declassified UFO reports. These things, previously the preserve of niche communities and dismissed as old fogeyism in the face of the modern consensus, have been released back into the public consciousness – though with nods to the existing religions – even ones you wouldn’t expect, like social justice. The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office says as much, under their heading “Has the Department found any evidence of extraterrestrial technology?”

“No.  Examination of UAP sightings is ongoing.  AARO uses a rigorous scientific framework and data-driven approach to better understand UAP.  We will follow the science wherever it leads.”

“Follow the science wherever it leads” sounds awfully faithful, if you ask me.

Demystified Mental Models

Before going any further, let’s talk about how mystery disappeared in the first place. Mental models are ideas about how the world works – just simple versions that we use in everyday life. A quick example is in order, like: how does a ballpoint pen work? Just look up the Wikipedia page and you’ll know how a ball pen works fairly quickly – a ballpoint pen is a tube of ink in a plastic container, tipped with a ball at the point that is coated in the ink and rolls around, leaving the ink on the paper. Unlike fountain pens and other older designs, with a more variable rate of ink flow, ballpoint pens don’t require careful management of pressure and stroke to work – they just do.

All this is too complicated to remember most of the time, so your mental model of a pen might look something like this:

Pens write, and if they don’t, they’re out of ink, have a busted point, or need a shake to get all the ink together.

See? Much easier to remember than the paragraph before, making it more useful when your pen suddenly stops writing. Just check the ink, test the point, and, if you can’t figure it out, toss it and get a new one. No mystery at all. Simple frameworks work great for simple things, and as long as there’s no need to go any further, things can stay as they are.

Unfortunately, things these days are complicated – so complicated that even the simple model is both difficult to assemble and insufficient. Metals are mined on the other side of the world from the factories they're worked at, before making another long trip to be sold, means that those three areas have to be coordinated - the countries need to allow import and export, taxes and customs duties need to be agreed, and freight forwarders look for the best routes between where the products need to go. In the same way, your personal shopping on a delivery app coded far away and Internet providers that operate across your whole country, shipping stuff from abroad to a warehouse where hundreds of delivery drivers move stuff straight to your door. Anything along this chain going wrong might not be your responsibility, but it's your problem. As with any problem, we try to collect information to solve it - which is both more and more varied than ever before. People are encouraged to spread wide and reach across the ground rather than plant deep roots everywhere in particular – involved in everything and rooted in nothing, collecting factoids that never come together into actual facts.

This is what has happened to us. Cause and effect still hold – but the individual links in the chain are so small that we can no longer see them. Threads so fine we can barely see them are what bind us together. Mystery was replaced with nothing.

Think of it like a car. At the most basic level – as long as you start it up and know how to work the steering wheel and the pedals, you can drive a car. No understanding is needed of the gasoline, the engine, the crankshaft, the transmission, or the wheels and tires – the cause is stepping on the gas, and the effect is acceleration. All the intermediate links of the chain are obscured, leading to situations where some people don’t know they need to change the oil in their car. The role of lubricating oil is hidden because the car just works most of the time, and if your model is “pedals make car go and stop”, you might not even know what the oil is for. Cause and effect is simultaneously still in operation (in the physical world) but entirely ignored (by our mental models), with dangerous results.

Anything complex and difficult to understand is vulnerable to this. Most people’s idea of electricity is generated at a power plant, carried on wires to your house, metered, and available at the flick of a switch. Under this framework, “cheap” wind and solar electricity, which requires no fuel, is an obvious choice. Electricity, however, needs to be generated at the same time as it is consumed, which means reliable electricity beats out unreliable/intermittent sources like wind and solar. When electricity is disrupted, it has grave consequences – spoiled goods that need refrigeration, hospital patients put in further danger, and many more.

This complication is familiar to my regular or long-time readers, who have definitely heard this theme before. The entire Communication Overhead category on the site is about this – best said in two parts by The Information Superhighway and Communication Overhead, my first two pieces on the matter.

https://argomend.substack.com/p/turn-off-the-information-superhighway

https://argomend.substack.com/p/communication-overhead

In short, integration and interdependence brought about by increasing informational density has made a much broader and larger body of information has become “need to know”. This increases the amount of time needed to take on information to become a functioning member of society, disempowering the individual who also needs to hold down a job or raise a family and doesn’t have the time to be an active gatherer of information. Most people naturally then stay in their lane and rely on others to gather information and think on ideas for them[1]. In short, there’s too much to know and not enough time.

What are we, then, to trust?

Maybe the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

Pastafarians rise up!

He’s real, you know!

Our Lord and Spaghetti!

The Remystification of Mental Models

The weakening of the rigid adherence to cause and effect that keeps mental models honest and easy to agree to has made them a lot more varied. Particularly with the Internet bringing us all closer together, we find that we can’t agree on anything anymore – while we might agree in the broad strokes, closer examination of our individual mental models reveals differences. The question of the effect of carbon dioxide on global temperature, however, has a range of answers that includes:

What I call Alarmists/Catastrophists – Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, and their academic supporters, who believe that increasing carbon dioxide concentrations will turn the planet into a massive hothouse and are an immediate threat that demands an extreme response. By disrupting our current supply chains, energy infrastructure, and plunging us into poverty.

Most public figures will fall into Wishy-Washers – John Kerry, who talks a good game but still takes a private jet being the perfect example, along with most of the US 2024 Presidential candidates. They talk a good game about green initiatives, but they keep acting business-as-usual. Somehow, despite acting the same and still promising economic growth, we’re supposed to believe that things will be fine.

There’s the Agnostics – William Nordhaus’ study talking about the optimum temperature increase doesn’t talk about the effects of carbon dioxide or the idea of it, but makes hay using the predictions of existing climate models to make policy. Taking the existing research on its face, they extend it to promote policy to help us figure out what to do, without really taking a strong position on the underlying phenomenon. The science is settled, no matter what.

Then there’s the Skeptics – starting with Bjorn Lomborg the statistician who agrees with carbon dioxide heating up the world, but not that it’s the bad thing, and heading farther and farther out until you reach Steven Koonin’s Unsettled – a book that skewers the carbon dioxide claims and provides alternative explanations for the changing climate. For a relatively compact summary of some of this side’s arguments, Climate The Movie is a good start. If the “climate change crisis” is mediated by carbon dioxide, the skeptics question the bits – whether climate change is a crisis, or if carbon dioxide causes it.

As we can see, each one of these groups has their own causal chain, at different stages. The Skeptics are questioning root causes, the Wishy-Washers and Catastrophists on the effects, and the Agnostics taking all that for granted and already looking at consequences. Highly qualified PhD’s, scientists, and people who have all the degrees and hallmarks of intelligence, who study this for a living, cannot seem to agree on what is and what to do about it. Since figuring things out properly is impractical, we, the audience, need to turn to something, or someone else¹.

Fame, Feelings, and Faith

Imagine you’re with a friend, watching a boxing match, the UFC, or a street fight with no experience in fighting. He’s there to watch a shorter guy he called “Rollo the Thumper”, who he claims “rolls with the punches and delivers a thumpin’”. You’re watching them go at it. You have no idea what’s going on, and your friend turns to ask you “who do you think is winning?” Is it the handsome taller man, using his reach to punch from a distance but who’s clearly sweating, or Rollo, the broad-shouldered shorter guy who’s got his arms in front of his head, waiting for the taller guy to gas out?

Not knowing anything about fighting, you’ve got plenty of ways to decide:

• The taller guy, being a handsome gigachad who just looks like a winner must be winning. You just feel it. (Feelings)

• Rollo the Thumper has a name and your friend came to see him, so he must be good – so he’s probably winning. (Fame)

• Just pick one and believe in them no matter what, hoping the fight doesn’t prove you wrong. (Faith)

• Honestly say you don’t know and duck the question. (Honesty)

This is essentially the expectation that is placed on us by the interconnected world. Increasingly atomized by constant conflict, we’re forced to find out other people’s opinions so we can find someone to commiserate and draw together with that is “safe”. In the name of “democratic participation” and “being informed”, we’re pushed into taking sides in issues we don’t understand that hold our friendships, our reputations, and our work hostage if you give the wrong answer – or no answer. Acting on feelings, fame, and faith are far better for us in order to let others know where we stand – so that’s what we do.

All three of these things are certainly subjective, but I’d like to zoom in and focus on faith. Faith, unlike the others, doesn’t particularly care about the existing cause-and-effect chain or anything they can observe. Rather than feelings and fame, it relies on a new causal chain rather than intuition or social proof. Faith is a positive statement of belief, starting from a particular place and extrapolating forward – the root of the causal chain itself.

But now that the effects – the things we “know” are happening – are mysterious to us, the causes we infer from them can now be anything.

Mystery has returned to the world.

Remystified Mental Models

Libertarians in the Mises Institute. Climate sabotage activists. Christian nationalism. Conspiracy theory. Climate skeptics. White nationalists. Critical race theory. NAFO. Russia supporters. BRICS believers. Bitcoiners. Flat Earthers. You name a field, there’s a fringe thing about it that’s “dangerous” and “gaining ground”, and we have to fight against it. Increasing polarization on all sides because we don’t see the same things anymore. The effects are subjective and different for everyone.

And if that’s the case, the causes are subjective too.

Freedom of speech. Demographic collapse. Competency crisis. Government corruption. Big business financially looting the world. International conspiracy via Davos and the WEF. QAnon and trusting the plan. Patriarchal oppression. Fascists and right-wingers run the world. Free market capitalism. Late-stage capitalism. Excessive government regulation. The Federal Reserve and Central Banks. Demonic possession and ticket-taking among the upper class. These are the gods that currently reside on modern Mount Olympus, hurtling lightning bolts down on us.

Influencers and celebrities are the new Satyrs, keeping the party going. AI-generated images, music, and words are the new Nymphs, offering us impossible beauty in the form of big titted anime waifus. Demigods work at corporate offices and high positions at government, sit at the head of businesses, crypto and real estate millionaires, and aspiring lawyers and politicians that rub up against the gods or each other, their battles reported in politics, business, and entertainment sections of the daily news for your perusal. Those that believe the same are benevolent angels. Those against what you believe are malicious demons.

Zeus Biden sits on Mount Olympus with his lightning bolt ready to strike.

Laser eyes are just lightning bolts, right?

That should be in the next edition of Mythology.

Anybody else read this in school?

Be careful of the effects you observe, the causes you infer, the gods you worship and the demons you rebuke. The gods are fickle, and they care little for the belief and faith you hold. The egregores and isms that truly run the world these days don’t know or care that you exist. They themselves may not even exist.

Faith

Faith is the cause at the root of the causal chain - faith in cause in effect, faith that things will work out, and faith that life is, and will be, good. Faith is a positive and conscious statement of belief, that underpins all other things.

Using cause and effect relies on you believing in cause and effect.

Trusting in fame and the approval of others relies on you trusting those others.

Following your feelings means trusting your feelings.

Be conscious of your faith. Your faith is yours alone to give. Give it to those who deserve it and measure it out carefully to those who you trust.

That forgotten love of ours – faith – returns in our darkest hour to center us. But the truth is, it never left, only waited for when it was needed.

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[1]Better explained here: https://argomend.substack.com/p/global-paradox-2023

1. I’m firmly in the skeptic camp, as you can read in the piece blow. While I’m no expert, the very certain and apocalyptic claims of the climate change crowd require extraordinary evidence - and I see well-constructed evidence in opposition. Big claims on one side and restrained ones on the other leads me towards the restrained claims.