Fifteen years ago I wrote a series May We Believe Our Thoughts which covered some of the popular edges of the science, philosophy, and reflection on how reliable even our best thinking is. We already know that our automatic thinking is often very shortcut and unreliable, but how about when we really try?
I have written half a dozen times on politics being performative in general, and whether the cynical paranoia that everything is a scam and we are too wise to be taken in ("The Dwarves are for the Dwarves") is really believed or adoped as a world-weary pose.
I am now turning that flashlight onto True Crime, wondering if people really believe that the Canton police could really be planting evidence, or that Patrick Clancy masterminded not only a non-impulsive triple murder of his children but cleverly and undetectably framed his wife for the deed, including an attempted suicide? Or is it all much vaguer than that: I stand with women and corrupt men get away with too much.
This is not new, at least not brand new. They are similar to the Andrea Yates case. Jonbenet Ramsey's parents were accused of murdering her, mostly on the basis that people thought it was creepy to have little girls in beauty pageants, so...you know...people like that...they might do anything, right? The Pamela Smart case was right near here. We would drive by the prison she was in every day before she was transferred. There were protests in the parking lot, "JUSTICE FOR PAME" because women felt she was being railroaded. I worked with a few women who went to a protest or two back in the 1990's. Interestingly both seemed to respond to my suggestion that there were a thousand better causes in the world, and if they wanted to help women in general there were better ways. This is part of why I wonder how deeply into the belief these Lindsey Clancy supporters are.
I don't want to get into defining what "belief" means, or making deep distinctions between Belief A and Belief B. No doubt these are important and a wonderful intellectual exercise. I don't care. I want the simple version these days. Intellectual laziness has taken over. CS Lewis found that when he gave talks to servicemen during the war that many of them believed it was all propaganda anyway. He wondered why they would continue to fight at all, then, and decided that the drive to "stick to your mates," and be loyal to a town, a flag, or a regiment was more powerful than country or abstract notions of justice in the end. Women being loyal to Lindsey may be more like that. Do they really believe it? Well, they certainly really disbelieve the opposite. They certainly don't believe that the police are trustworthy or supposedly good husbands aren't just clever sociopaths. Patrick divorced her and got remarried (the bastard). They don't leave their own husbands because they believe they are wiser now. They were fooled by men before, but now they know how to see through things. This husband is fine.
I admit I can't sort it out. I can't tell you what the pivot point is that sends some women to the disbelief category and others to the belief side of the ledger. Is it a narrow thing that a single good friend on the other side could switch them, or is it almost inevitable if we only could add up their clues? Does it change over time?
