Here are some studies to get you, my dear reader, thinking:

• The heritability of political affiliation is over 50%, while shared environment has no impact (study 1, study 2). This means that what your parents teach you about politics has no impact whatsoever on your political views, and the only reason why children tend to have similar political views to their parents is because of genetics.
• Democrats are very much distracted in tasks by the appearance of smiley faces looking in the wrong direction, whereas conservatives are not distracted whatsoever by such faces, thus implying that democrats are more easily manipulated by their perceptions of others (gaze cuing study).
• Spiral of silence – a sociological phenomenon where in Asian countries, if opinions are presented on surveys as being less popular, than respondents are less likely to approve of said opinions, whereas in America the exact opposite is true – if an opinion is presented as less popular, that actually makes Americans more likely to support it.
• Democrats show less empathy towards conservatives than conservatives show towards democrats (study).
• Liberals understand the moral foundations of conservatives less than vice versa (source).
• Liberals implicitly respond to group morality before rejecting it explicitly, and their implicit reactions to moral stimuli prove that Johnathan Heidt’s moral foundation theory is completely false, because their implicit reactions to stimuli completely contradict their self-rated views of morality (source).

In this essay, I will discuss some of my opinions as to why people are psychologically inclined to believe falsehoods over truth.

Specifically Amongst Democrats

The greatest case study in people believing falsehoods I believe is that of the views of the Democrats. Since in other essays I have already extensively explained and proved that the democrats are wrong and evil about everything, all I will do here is simply focus on why they are wrong. So, here are the reasons:

1. They are prideful and want to view themselves as heroes or intellectuals.
2. They don’t have a love of the truth.
3. They care about power and getting what they want over right and wrong and liberty and property rights.
4. They are not guided by the light of Christ and therefore have digested the typical Satanic talking point that nobody is evil and we should therefore be tolerant.
5. Posturing to look good for the world.
6. They excessively compare themselves to others, thus leading to an obsession with fairness and lust for taking other people’s money.
7. A sense of entitlement.
8. Caring about appearance of evil over actual evil, and similarly caring about the appearance of good over actual good, thus leading to strange things such as making sacrifices to be good even though said sacrifices didn’t actually accomplish anything, since the underlying goal was the sacrifice in itself.
9. Inability to intellectualize disagreements and instead turn them into issues of victimhood and who is a better person.

The above reasons I think are somewhat reflective genuine moral failings in democrats. Here are a few more reasons which more relate to general irrationality:

1. Allowing worldly authorities or popular opinion to influence your own personal views.
2. Having a more maternal personality and thus caring more about caregiving (often using resources acquired from others) over providing and protecting.
3. Being emotional and thus being susceptible to emotional viruses (which are ideas that spread due to their emotional appeal, rather than their degree of truth).
4. Being close minded and thus dismissing people as immoral when you first hear them instead of first considering whether they are true. Yes, I know that democrats perceive themselves to be the open-minded ones, but I have learned by sad experience that there is very little correlation between how open-minded a person thinks they are, and how open minded they actually are.
5. Being reactionary against things you are told are bad instead of having positive goals, thus making you very susceptible to propaganda that tells you to hate a specific person, seeing that for almost every public figure there will at least be a bit of dirt that you can dig up on them, and then this dirt can be magnified to insane proportions in the mind of the public given enough repetition by the media.
6. Engaging in one step thinking, or even zero step thinking – such not considering the effects of an action at all and only thinking it is bad because it sounds mean.
7. Getting overly offended when people attack your friends – when in reality criticism will always be necessary to make good policy.
8. Being naive about evil.
9. Seeing the world as more abundant than it really is (called the unconstrained vision).

To note: I am probably missing many factors, and as the political dynamics change in the long run, these factors likely will change and perhaps even some personality attributes which led people to believe falsehood will switch over to instead lead people towards the truth.

I think these factors also would have explained variation in religious attitudes during the early years of Christianity, as in that time period there would have been significant social incentives to not be Christian, and therefore only people who truly loved the truth would have chosen to be Christian. However, nowadays that Christianity is popularized and also subverted, I think that having correct political views is at least equal to having correct religious views in terms of being a marker for a person having a love for the truth.

My Crazy Theory

Most of the reasons in the above paragraph boil down to variations in human irrationality and selfishness – of which there are a great many forms. But I think there is an even more pernicious explanation for political differences and indeed all ideological differences – which is that the attraction to believing in inconsistent and false things is actually *because* they are inconsistent and bad. From my personal experiences, I believe that certain people feel a natural draw towards movements that exercise power, authority, and impose and enforce their morality upon others. For these people, if they see gatekeeping against certain viewpoints, instead of being annoyed at the gatekeepers for violating freedom and mercy and justice and truth, they instead subconsciously internalize that such viewpoints must somehow be bad since they are gatekept. Same applies for shaming people for having “immoral” views, or punishing people for falling out of line, or unduly rewarding people for having the approved views, or unnecessary ceremonial self-congratulation for trivial things: all of these movements of power make people subconsciously think that the power must have been right.

This is why the bad is always more appealing than the good – because the good restrains itself from cruelty, vanity, and pride – all of this means that the good exercises the power it holds less often – which ironically makes people less attracted to it. And when the bad unduly uses its power in forms of cruelty, irrationality, and vanity, instead of being outraged, people interpret this as signals that the bad must have actually been right. To emphasize, this is not simply about possession of power, but rather about exercise of power. Since the good limits itself but the bad doesn’t, the bad will always exercise its power more than the good, and so people will be drawn to the bad over the good, all else being held equal. And the crazy thing is that these movements of power are more felt when the power is done in an irrational fashion – if power is used justly, then people won’t be surprised or moved, because they already were expecting it. However, if power is used irrationally, then the fact that it was “irrational” will make it feel like the movement and use of power was greater than it actually was, which will – ironically – actually make people more drawn to it.

Thus, for example, if I guilt trip everyone into using 5 different types of trash cans – the fact that having 5 trashcans is totally unnecessary when trash can already easily be automatically sorted at landfills, and actually makes trash collection even more expensive not less – will not convince people. Rather, people will be impressed that you used your power to enforce something so trivial and will therefore subconsciously infer that there is something morally good about using 5 trash cans – and therefore if they are challenged on this view, they will become totally irrational and insistent that 5 trash cans is better. They might even go so far as to believe that the sacrifice of using 5 trash cans in itself is a positive good, even if it doesn’t actually have any real effect. On the flip side, if decided to have a law against shop-lifting, then people won’t be surprised at all, and therefore will care much less about whether shop-lifting is a problem then whether the 5 trash cans are properly used – even though shop-lifting impacts peoples lives infinitely more than the exactly correct technique of trash collection.

But to extend the irrationality a bit further, if I then started having all these self-congratulatory ceremonies in my political movement congratulating people for not-shop lifting, then people would start to see my movement as “good and law-abiding”, not because my self-congratulations made sense, but because it didn’t make sense, and this therefore *moved* them. If instead of doing self-congratulations, I used political meetings to strategize and report, and equally covered the victories of the movement with the losses, then people wouldn’t really feel anything and would be less manipulated, even though this is actually how political meetings should work.

Application to Christian Zionism

I feel like one of the best examples of this mindset is the pro-Israel views of the boomer republicans which are so obviously mutually contradictory. For example, if I were to say something mean about black people to them, they would all get offended because “collective justice is wrong” and “we shouldn’t judge people by immutable characteristics” – however if Israel decides to do something crazy like shut down highways in the west bank to Palestinians who live in the west bank, but then allow Israelis who don’t live in the west bank to use said highways, and do this in an institutionally racist way against Palestinians, then this is all just fine. Similarly, if 40% of Palestinians support Hamas, then that is reason enough in their view to have collective guilt against all Palestinians for the October 7 attack, but if I ever point out that 80% of Jews are democrat, and both religious and non-religious Jews have a higher rate of being democrat than even atheists, and Jews provide over half of political donations to democrats, and almost all of the early communist philosophers and political leaders were Jews, and 70% of the civil rights lawyers were Jews, and 100% of the infamously leftwing Hollywood executives are Jewish, despite there being over 10 times more non-Jewish white people who receive national merit scholarships than Jewish people who receive such scholarships, and therefore it appears that basically all of the US’s political problems would never have happened without the Jewish influence, then they will start lecturing me about how I should treat people as individuals and not as members of a group. Or if I complain about how America sends too much money to Israel, then they all start saying that I have the victim mindset, and that I am woke right and feel too sorry about myself and blame too many of our problems on other countries, but then they themselves have an even worse blanketly absurd victim mindset views about the Jews – that the Palestinians hate the Jews because the Jews are Jews, and not because the Jews stole their ancestral homeland.

All of this behavior just seems insane because it is so internally inconsistent, and yet a great many people have this. Why? Because the Jewish-Zionist-Conservative gatekeepers are cruel. When these gatekeepers shut down the bank-accounts of Nick Fuentes, and discipline everyone for having interviews with him, and excommunicate Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly from the movement for being against donations to Israel, these idiot conservatives internalize that there *must* being something really bad that Tucker Carlson did, and forever therefore are totally irrational in any discussion. Similarly, when they incorporate into religion this worship of a foreign entity, and force all the politicians to kneel at the wall in Israel, and forever repeat the tired mantra that “Israel is our greatest ally”, a great many poor idiots internalize all of these uses of power as evidence that they are actually true (fun fact, there are 27 countries that have more US troops stationed in them than Israel). They then claim that Tucker Carlson is actually the meanspirited one, but the truth is that if he exercised his political power in an equally cruel fashion to enforce his moral system upon others via shame, then they would be on Carlson’s side – since they appreciate power. But of course the good side will never do that, because, well, the good side is good. And if Carlson used his political power in a way that made sense – such as advocating for honesty and against corruption – then they wouldn’t care either, because again using power in an “approved and expected” way is not surprising and doesn’t really matter that much in demonstrating whether you truly have power.

Thus, there will always be an attraction towards the evil, the cruel, the vain, the irrational, and the self-righteous.

* of course, to exercise power in this manipulative fashion only works if you do it right. If you use power against people, but don’t attempt to simultaneously also enforce your morality upon others via self-righteousness, vanity and shame, then the sheep will just see you as an authoritarian. On the contrast, if you try to enforce your morality upon others, but don’t actually have the institutional power to cancel and gatekeep people, then people will merely interpret this as you being whiny. And if you have a lot of institutional power, but never use it to hurt others or unduly congratulate yourself, then this will do nothing, because people care about movements of power, not possession of power.

All of this explains why it was only after the covid mandates and lockdowns ended that people became willing to believe that the covid vaccinations were bad. The lockdowns subconsciously manipulated people into thinking the covid vaccines must be good for some reason, but once the use of power present in the lockdowns ceased, the subconscious motivation to believe the covid narrative decreased.

Idolatry

I think the ultimate manifestation of this mindset was in the form of idol worship. Forcing people to sacrifice prized possessions to an inanimate object, and then shaming people for not having adequate loyalty to the object, or self-congratulating yourself for being the supporter of that inanimate object – when it was you yourself who built said object – is just such a deliciously irrational yet forceful use of power, that it makes perfect sense to me that this would subconsciously manipulate people into believing that fealty to an inanimate object is actually the most important moral attribute.

Indeed, the very act of idolatry somewhat boils down to worshipping something, not because it is true or virtuous, but because it has political power despite being devoid of life. And that is the exact encapsulation of my crazy theory about why people are drawn to believe evil and falsehood.

And I fully expect to see the revival of this idol mindset during my lifetime. Powerful people already are trying to build AI gods, and when that happens I anticipate all of the same irrationality surrounding the AI gods as the past Idols: crazy virtue signaling that you support the god, shaming and denigrating people against the god, filling pop-culture with music and TV shows and movies celebrating the AI god, and frequent irrational sacrifices to *prove* that you truly support the god.

And when the AI god does cruel or weird things, and yet it is still obeyed, that will solidify in people’s minds that the god truly is in charge and is to be trusted and adored. And all of this will be done by the very people who helped make the god – the ones who should have known that it is just a machine!

Love of the Truth

In summary, in this essay I have broadly identified three factors that lead people away from truth.

1. Selfishness and vanity.
2. Natural human irrationality and susceptibility to manipulation.
3. A natural pull towards trusting in entities that exercise power, which usually means entities which are evil, since the good tends to prefer using persuasion over coercion and shame.

The natural question then arises: why do people find the truth. I guess a few reasons may include: Valuing freedom, justice, truth, reason, right and wrong, Godly virtue, and the true promptings of the spirit. However, all of these reasons basically boil down to the simple principle of having a love of the truth.

If you have a strong love for the truth, then you likely will eventually overcome all of your own natural irrationalities. However, if you don’t love the truth, then you will never ever find the truth, and nothing could ever make you accept the truth, except the type of raw coercion that only evil typically uses.

This is why we see in the scriptures that having a love for the truth is likely one of the main factors which will determine whether people are deceived by the beast during the great tribulation.

2 Thessalonians 2:9-12
9 Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders,
10 And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.
11 And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:
12 That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

And the opposite of having a love of the truth is having vain imaginations and a reprobate mind:

Romans 1:21-32
21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.
24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:
25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.
26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:
27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.
28 And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;
…32 Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

As you can see in these scriptures, they both promise that people who don’t love the truth and instead turn to vain imaginations will be changed – in the first scripture they are changed by receiving a strong delusion, and in the second scripture they receive a reprobate mind and many have their natural sexuality changed.

Therefore, let us all cultivate a strong love for the truth. Instead of reacting with emotion or spite against the messenger, let us consider and ponder. Let us pray and let us obey the commandments. And hopefully God will fill us with his Holy Spirit so that we may be able to find the truth in all things, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Thanks for reading!