MINI BOOK REVIEW of USEFUL DELUSIONS: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain by Shankar Vedantam and Bill Messler
from Paul Ho, Litchatte Writer
Shankar Vedantam makes one case after another that a little lying will go a long way towards making this world more livable, pleasant and safer.
Take the example of fake knee surgeries for arthritis where participants in a medical study sign off on the possibility that they might be getting a placebo incision instead of the real thing. The fake surgeries turned out to have the exact same cure rate as the real ones. The doctor conducting the study called the results “jaw dropping.”
They say that healthy people with “positive illusions” have better life results than those with pessimistic outlooks. A study by Fruehwirth shows that religious people generally live longer than regular people. They have greater support networks and more friends. All these things tend to foster better health. And it doesn’t hold true in different types of social groups. This only applies to religions.
But it’s not all good news. Sometimes we convince ourselves we’re right when we are really wrong. He talks about cults that predict events which never happen. The followers often stay in these groups even when its prophecies fall through because members don’t want to admit they were wrong after they sold their house, quit their jobs, and moved into the commune. Some even become more committed after the failure of the prophecy.
Vedantam describes a Penn and Teller show where they test drinking water. It was shown that the audience much preferred the taste of expensive-looking drinking water poured from an elegant bottle with a fancy label to free water poured from a budget bottle. As you have probably guessed, it turns out to be exactly the same water.
In my experience, many nonfiction books tend to be front-loaded. All the good stuff happens in the first few chapters. This book, however, has a wild evolutionary scenario in its very last chapter that I found unusual and compelling, although I’m not sure exactly how it fits into the overall theme:
He theorizes that when human society was in its infancy, small groups lived together intimately. Everyone knew everyone else, and more importantly, they knew who could be trusted and who to avoid. Therefore, there was no need for laws or governments. Everyone in the community was able to fend for him or herself.
As groups grew much larger, laws had to be instituted because people didn’t know their neighbors anymore. As society advanced, the advent of agriculture made it possible, for the first time, to hoard wealth. Organized governments and stringent laws were instituted to regulate the resulting preponderance of self-interest.
As the cult of self-interest began to spread, religions came into fashion as another way to control greed and dishonesty. Fear of dreadful (Biblical) outcomes scared people into behaving morally. (Remember, this is the book talking, not me).
As societies grew even larger, Gods also became larger and more fearsome. People in the same religion found common ground in that they all feared terrible retribution from the same angry God (or gods, or goddesses). They created pointless rituals which were only performed by true believers. The more pointless the rituals were, the more likely it was that the followers were truly committed to their religion. Why would anyone perform these complicated meaningless ceremonies unless they were sincere in their belief?
Eventually, he goes on to say, the state became the dominant force in society. The better the state, he says, the less religiosity was needed to control people. Thus, religions grew weaker in the more responsible states, and stronger in the less responsible states. That checks out pretty well in the world today. At least I think it does.
In the above theory (which I have summarized to the extreme), Vedantam basically squeezes the evolution of human society into a very succinct nutshell. On the other hand, his view of the world was so complex, I couldn’t even tell if it was cynical or optimistic.
A couple of years ago I was caught in a flash flood while driving home after a date. I was really scared that my mother’s old Mercury was going to drown. If it did, I would have been stuck in the middle of a torrential rainstorm with nowhere to go. I started chanting because I believed that the chanting might help. There wasn’t much else I could do. So, there I was, driving at a snail’s pace down a severely flooded highway, chanting loudly in a half-submerged car, all by myself. I normally would never do that.
Although the water came halfway up the door, I made it home safely. Is that to say the chanting saved me from drowning? Some people would say so. Vedantam, however, would call my chanting a useful delusion. Perhaps keeping alive the hope that everything will turn out OK is the underlying takeaway of this book. Panic and worry never make things better.
Comments welcome at the bottom of any Litchatte blog. Paul and or I will respond personally – Murray Ellison – Litchatte Editor
Shankar Vedantam Hosts a podcast on NPR called “The Hidden Brain”.
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