Comments on: Fear, God, and State

By: farouk

farouk — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 12:12:08 +0000

this makes sense, I think people start first to become attached to this stronger force but if nothing happened they totally lose hope and become depressed. when someone finds himself totally helpless especially when it lasts for a long time he may question God’s existence or the presence of a mighty force that can save him.

By: Anders Sandberg

Anders Sandberg — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:24:01 +0000

A while ago I played around with the GSS data to look at the link between religious fundamentalism and crime. The results can be seen here:
http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2007/01/criminal_because_of_god_or_godly_because_of_crime.html

Fundamentalist people do not seem to be more criminal than non-fundamentalists but they seem to live in places where crime is common and experience more fear in their daily environment. I concluded my post by speculating that mortality salience is a key factor here: living in a bad place makes you more fearful, and this makes you conservative one way or another.

By: Emily

Emily — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 03:04:35 +0000

If you’re interested in people who have been doing this sort of thing for a while, in addition to people who have critiqued these sorts of accounts, you might want to check out Terror Management Theory. The idea is to study an individual’s ideological reactions following a reminder of her mortality, or “mortality salience.” The experiments (though often difficult to get past ethics review boards) do have a number of robust results. The theory in which they are nestled is bit more open to objections.

By: Mary

Mary — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 02:39:07 +0000

Couldn’t the relationship work the other way around? People who are taught to respect and obey authority cede control to that authority and do not feel the responsibility to make their own decisions.

By: Daniel Humphries

Daniel Humphries — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 01:45:22 +0000

Interesting post.

Of course the key difference between faith that God will solve our problems and faith that the State will solve our problems is that, regardless of its effectiveness, at the very minimum, the State actually exists.

By: John

John — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 04:26:51 +0000

>A 4th experiment showed … a challenge to the usefulness of external systems of control led to increased illusory perceptions of personal control.

So being an entrepreneur and being a libertarian reinforce each other. Interesting.

By: Caledonian

Caledonian — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:18:56 +0000

We know that feeling unable to control events is extraordinarily stressful, much more so than being exposed to negative events which we have some ability to respond to in an effective way. See Learned Helplessness for a very brief summary.

It is reasonable to expect people to create delusions of control and influence when reality offers them no way to respond. It’s the belief that makes us feel better, and so it will tend to be produced regardless of whether it has any basing in truth.

If people don’t have any way to improve their economic conditions, but they have the power to give government more authority, they will delude themselves that the government will improve their economic conditions and give it more power. Possibly if their ideology holds that government power is bad, they will reduce it to increase their feelings of control even if it leads to an overall increase in harm, or even if it ends up harming them directly.

By: Lord

Lord — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:27:52 +0000

I think investor research documents the degree to which confidence leads investors astray while lack of confidence can either lead to trust in the market, trust in an advisor, or distrust and avoidance of the market. While advisors can be the province of con men and scoundrels, they tend to be the preferred choice and tend to outperform most individual investors though certainly not all. This would suggest self-confidence is more biased.

By: Alan

Alan — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:47:53 +0000

“It seems we hope a stronger and more benevolent God or State will protect us when feel less able to protect ourselves.”

The fact that we are dealing with a cross-national data set is especially interesting. I will have to read the journal article. Obviously, notions of deity and political identity will vary widely.

One emblematic example of overt trust in a benevolent detity is in the “Gott mit Uns” belt buckle worn by German soldiers in WWI–translated as God with Us. In other contexts, the notion of King and Country is almost fungible with God and Country. They say there are no atheists in foxholes (whether an apt saying or not is debatable).

On the other hand, might not widespread belief in a benevolent deity or government also give rise to hubris, a tendency to taking unreasonable risks–in a word, moral hazard?

By: Humeirah Fasq

Humeirah Fasq — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:55:55 +0000

Personal control comes hand in hand with a lucid awareness of oneself- this comprises an acceptance of not only one’s morally good but also morally bad inclinations. After all, such moral biasness is created through an artificial separation of values, which apparently originates from Platos philosophy. These values have also infiltrated non religious systems (an obvious example is the UN), thanks of course to Sir Thomas Aquinas.

At the end of the day any ’system’ of whatever nature, which of course seeks to homogenize values and standards would inevitably be of interest to those who cannot make up their own values and standards.(as Nietzsche says for those who can only obey and not command) Systems crush individualism. And individualism increases with personal control. That is why thinking atheists, as I like to call them, are not part of any system whatsoever because they create their own values, and eventually develop their own very individualistic traits.

Very existentialist and very Nietzschean.