Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [211]
* Josephus is not an unproblematic source, since he is variously accused of being an apologist for the Romans and an apologist for the Jews. Still, his writings constitute the most extensive extant account of Judas of Galilee and his followers, and even those historians with different interpretations of this era of Jewish life generally take him as their point of departure.
† The Masada holdouts might actually have been Sicarii, a splinter group of the Zealots that was even more zealous. Josephus distinguishes between the two, but inconsistently, and other reports are conflicting.
* I am not trying to suggest a moral equivalence among these events, or between an enslaved minority fighting to liberate its people (e.g., the original Zealots) and a ruling class fighting to promulgate its own power (e.g., the Third Reich). The roots of violent conflict are invariably complex, manifold, and, above all, specific; and differences between the strength of various zealous groups and the merits of their causes are, of course, salient. However, I am interested here not in how these groups differ but in what they have in common: an unshakable sense of rightness.
* One implication of James’s argument is that doubt, like certainty, can be dangerous in sufficiently large doses. There’s a nice illustration of this in the realm of mental health. William Hirstein, the psychologist who studied confabulation, described it as “pathological certainty”: no matter how wild confabulators’ beliefs might be, they cannot be shaken. Hirstein saw a counterpoint to confabulation in obsessive compulsive disorder, which he called “pathological doubt.” Unlike confabulators, people with OCD want to “raise [the] standards of certainty to absurdly high levels.” Thus your partner reassuring you that he locked the door before coming upstairs is not sufficient proof that your door is really locked; nor, for that matter, is the fact that you yourself locked it five minutes ago. Doubt keeps creeping back in, even where it has no rightful or useful place. The psychiatrist Thomas Szasz didn’t write about confabulation, but he, too, saw unshakable conviction and chronic uncertainty as the two poles of mental illness. “Doubt is to certainty,” he wrote, “as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them.”
* My favorite description of this unfounded-belief conundrum comes not from Wittgenstein but (in second-or third-hand fashion) from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. In his book The Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz tells us of “an Indian story—at least, I heard it as an Indian story—about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked…what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? ‘Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down.’”
* Shakespeare’s own work notably fails to support this conclusion. The two most anguished men in his oeuvre (and possibly in all of literary history) are Prince Hamlet and King Lear—and if you think the former was destroyed by doubt, you should see what certainty did to the latter. Like Hamlet, Lear ends in a bloodbath, with the king, all three of his daughters, and most of the other major characters dead. Here, though, the agent of tragedy is Lear’s unshakable conviction and the haste with which he puts it into action. As leadership styles go, his more closely resembles the off-with-their-heads! recklessness of the Queen of Hearts than the contemplativeness