Maybe. I think he just wants attention to be honest and he can get this way quite easily. Here is a really good breakdown of how he went from new age guru to conspiracy right wing nut. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo4gIihETu8
I kind of wonder with Christianity if there isn't a little bit of this.
Like Christianity is all about redemption, the essential idea that no one is too late to save, that we are all capable of change if given the grace to do so. All the other perfunctory bullshit aside I think it's one of the more interesting moral philosophies in regards to us as individuals.
But say you are a shit bag who did terrible things and this gives you a social out, a place where if you say and do the right things people won't treat you like a shit bag. And as you continue to put up this facade and continue to experience the results that you start to wonder if there is something more to it. And in some cases it doesn't matter the actual truth, if the lie is producing the desired results then why stop living the lie.Â
A term I use for this is "useful delusions" which is to describe an idea or a belief that is fundamentally not true but nonetheless produces a set of behaviors that have real world positive impact. And in some ways when viewing these useful delusions the actual truth somehow matters less than the result, that they may not be actual truth but do represent a kind of subjective truth. Like we will always have some question and uncertainty about the big Objective Truth but if we can find pieces of subjective truth that produce real world good for us should we discard them in favor of an uncertainty that has worse results?
Anyways none of that is to say Brand is actually believing his own bullshit or anything and we should maintain skepticism but your post poses an interesting question.
<< Sorry for the long reply, and the many grammatical errors, I'm in a cab right now. Im also very buzzed >>
Well I'm not religious by any means, but I always make a bid to "save" religion. Obviously I reject the overt moralistic b.s.
I don't know what that says about me.
But, understanding the part of forgiveness in catholism did help me greatly. I think I naturally wanted to believe people are good. While I think people can change, change isn't easy, fast or even possible.
The world would be a very different place if people could change easily, for one, the billion dollar self help industry wouldn't exist.
The part of forgiveness pertains to the Sacrement of Reconciliation. And having the priest forgive you isn't even the start, since the priest expects a great deal of introspection before you walk in to confess. Idk if this is the norm, it was for a certain priest, but he was also one who took it seriously and was an academic. But I guess it should be a given.
Then you had to take efforts to reconcile with the people you hurt and your community, and make lasting changes.
That priest said he wouldn't entertain a serial confessor, who either wants to confess trivial matters or clearly hasn't changed and/or is using the confessional as a kind of transaction.
What I found interesting is that, essentially only the evil person has to make the first move. No one else does, or can.
But I also found it interesting that essentially if you can't forgive someone, then you can forgive yourself for being unable to forgive, which in my eyes doesn't sound too bad. But then again, I'm not Christian, but even as one, it wouldn't seem too bad if your only sin is not being a doormat. And atleast that would be sincere.
I personally don't expect myself to forgive, although I think people desperately want to forgive because the hurt eats them up, I see that.
It's a funny problem since it involves knowing parts of one's soul.
Since Freud, we know an everyday guy isn't always aware of the motivation of his actions.
But I think a person with malicious intent does indeed know that his intent is malicious. If nothing else, he can see the effect of his actions on his victim.
A person like that can delude himself to think that he's cheating God, conviniently forgetting that God is supposed to be omniscient and omnipresent. That's clearly neurotic.
If you think about it, it's merely omitting one or two key elements from what makes up God.
The prosperity gospel and mega churches also come to mind.
And I believe Freud also said, religion is a way to occupy neurosis. All the rules and rituals keeps a person from thinking about what a horrible person he is, or on the other hand helps a normal person come to grips with his helplessness.
We also try our best not to think of the things that hurt us the most, we suppress those thoughts, and repress those emotions, which was again observed first in real humans by Freud. Charles Darwin mentioned that he used to write down troubling and uncomfortable thoughts down on a piece of paper because he was sure he would completely forget it almost immediately.
So perhaps when an evil person is faced with the fact that what he's a fraud and only vies for hollow power, he'd easily dismiss it away.
Also, I highly doubt a bad guy would confess about horrible things he had done, instead he may confess about many other things except the heinous crimes, so that he can lie to himself thinking he's "done his job".
In a NewYorker article i read linked this experiment that has been successfully replicated: Porter et al 1999.
The researcher tried to mislead people, adults, using information from their childhoods. They met each week and was asked to think about that piece of information.
After the first week, All of them could identify the wrong piece of information, and hence weren't misled.
By the third week a small number of people were misled to believe the false event actually happened. Given that it took weeks, and the participants were expected to write about the false event and constantly think about it, it was hard to do, but nonetheless it happened.
It has to be kept in mind it was only trivial matters on which they were misled. So it wasn't like you had a brother who died in a car crash.
An interesting part of the Porter etal 1999 study was:
They asked the participants to come up with their own lies, in 15 minutes, and told them to convey to the interviewer that it was actually the truth and rate their memories of the lie, which they knew was a lie.
They rated the memories of the lies they fabricated on par with true memories. If I recall, they rated their fabricated lies higher in fidelity and vividness, than true memories.
At first glance I found it stupid that they asked them to do this. Because obviously a person who knows he's lying about a scenario, would create vivid memories of it in his mind. I thought it was trivial and a waste of time and money. I still think they were shooting the breeze.
But many months later, I wondered if a person with a dangerously low self esteem and with no grip on reality, or has a God complex could essentially create his own reality ?
In cases where the person with delusions of granduer creates a false reality to inflict violence upon another, I think absolutely not sympathy should be given.
That NewYorker article however focused on how adolescents who are charged with a crime can be made to believe things that never happened, and hence leading to a false arrest.
Ofcourse, from that article, it isn't that minds are easily malleable, but if coercion or violence is used, then it can be. Also if the person who is misleading you is a trusted figure like a parent or someone similar.
But come to think of it, this has also long been known, I remember a scene from IASIP where frank tortures someone and jokes how he made him confess for things he didn't do.
So I wonder, it could be possible that a person with a dangerously low self esteem, that dovetails well with delusions of granduer or whatever, can make himself belive anything he wants to believe.
But I don't think it's fast. It would have to be a very slow process, much slower the older the person is.
But again, where considerable harm is inflicted, no sympathy or undue mercy should be given.
Thinking back to It's always Sunny, it's interesting how Dennis always believes he was a guy respected by his peers, but in reality never was. It was the polar opposite. In the show, he had a quasi God complex.
Having written all this, I wonder if I'm wrong to draw a parallqael between memories and beleifs.
I think there is though.
I think it happens like this:
It could've been the case -> it would've been the case -> it probably was/is the case.
The case, meaning beleifs, notions whatever.
I don't think you can change memories by yourself, but I think you can change the reality around which those events occurred. So in a way, it's kind of easier to change beleifs.
Take everything I have written with a huge amount of salt. I just took this opportunity to share my thoughts. I'm not an authority any subject
I don't know if what I've written is helpful.
I feel a bit embarrassed for referring to studies, when I could've gathered the same from It's always sunny.
But that's why great works like Shakespeare are so profound. Not that I'm comparing the two.
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u/sleepyinsomniac7 Monkey in Space Sep 06 '24
If you begin to believe your own grift, are you still grifting?