JANUARY 13, THURSDAY

JANUARY 13, THURSDAY

FAITH: FEAR AND ATTRACTION

This post is back to the issue of what it is to be a human being, using my own experience as a guide but realizing that my own experience is not an adequate guide.

A woman I have heard about is smart, she is liberal, she is an anti vaxxer, but she is not, apparently, furious at the government. She just believes, because her doctor told her that the Covid vaccination should not be taken, that ivermectin will keep her safe. She also wears a mask and is afraid of Covid, but not enough to get vaccinated. She has a doctor authority figure, whom she trusts, who tells her not take the vaccine and to take ivermectin. I won‘t try to figure out why he says that. He could also quite well believe in ivermectin or he could know that he is giving false information but still does it for some reason.

But when I look at my own behavior with my financial advisor I see that I am doing much the same thing. She is an authority figure simply because she has had training and works with Starks Financial Group. The fact that she is 50 years younger than me or more doesn‘t matter. Everyone is younger than me and fewer and fewer authority figures are older. And in my case the fact that she is a young woman could make me as a traditional old male dismiss her, but she was so quick with answers and knew so much more than me and was so pleasant that I trusted her completely. Being a young woman was actually an advantage in gaining my trust, but that is also emotional. But the fact is that I was going on faith and so is the woman who trusts her doctor and takes ivermectin.

Then I noticed something else. I am having an issue with Airbnb over my stay in Morocco. A couple of days ago my United Airlines flight to Barcelona was cancelled and I finally gave up on going to Morocco, not because of fear of Covid but because I had had my two flights cancelled and could see that with Covid the flights going there and back were probably going to be increasingly uncertain leaving me high and dry somewhere. Both the Airbnb hosts said they were willing to cancel. But I couldn‘t get through to a person at Airbnb and the automated on line service ran me in circles without my being able to complete the cancellation and get my money back. But this post is not about my cancellation, it is about the odd way my feelings go up and down over an issue like this cancellation and other issues.

All the way through my interaction with Airbnb my rational, moderate side knew there probably wasn‘t an issue and when I finally got through to a person at Airbnb this morning we had a pleasant rational conversation. I think the refund will be resolved.

But there is another side of me that gets very irritated when something technical like Airbnb‘s automated artificial intelligence system deals with my practical issues. I both get irritated and paranoid thinking something terrible is going to happen. This is very similar to my boyhood fear in India of being swallowed by a man eating tiger. Rationally I knew it wasn‘t going to happen, but emotionally I couldn‘t sleep and have been afraid of the dark ever since.

It is this strange double side of me that I am wondering about that I think might connect with the woman who is relying on ivermectin and with my faith in my financial advisor.

I am operating on two tracks. My emotional side is either panicked or calmed based on faith. My rational side knows I am operating on faith but goes along with faith because it feels right. My rational side knows that I don‘t know what is actually happening but gives in completely to the emotional faith side.

This doesn‘t mean that I don‘t trust my financial advisor, because my rational side does. It means that I don‘t trust myself because I let the emotional side of me override the rational side and know that this could get me into trouble. Fear and paranoia can lead to faith in God or faith in American traditional values or faith in ivermectin or faith in Donald Trump.

I mentioned to my financial advisor that I had hoped for the stock market to crash under Trump, because that would have hurt Trump who kept arguing that he was the reason the stock market was going up (hint: it was greed), even though the stock market dropping would certainly have hurt me. How is that any different from risking dying rather than being vaccinated because you don‘t like the vaccinators? Both are irrational, emotional fear and anger.

Yet so much of what I believe is not something that I can rationally prove to be true. Most of what I believe most strongly is based on strong emotional attraction or fear. I am back to being Maggie the dog again, impelled by internal visceral forces. Patriotism is based on faith, white supremacy is based on faith, Christian fundamentalism (all fundamentalism) is based on faith, misogyny is based on faith, marriage is based on faith, ivermectin is based on faith.

Fear and resentment and paranoia is running rampant these days. With the Airbnb encounter I feel it welling up within myself and in that way that is no different from a militia man defending his country. Those fears are easy to whip up. If someone were to argue that Airbnb was a devious company, which my rational side knows they are not, how quickly I might be ready to believe anything bad about Airbnb. But the same is true of fear of the Democratic Party, fear of the elites, fear of Facebook, fear that Satan is out to get me or discovering ritual Satanism sacrifice at a Edenton kindergarten with no rational proof. If ivermectin will help why not take it?

So I am left feeling a little leery of the little voice within me that suddenly yanks me out of bed at 4 in the morning because of fear of losing money at Airbnb. And I realize that it was the same feeling of trust that got so many rational people, people much smarter and discerning than me, to believe Bernie Madoff when he offered to care for their money with a great return, or which tempted me a few days ago to register for an almost free gift over the Internet by only having to reveal my credit card number as I paid for shipping. Then distrust kicked in and fear countered my first emotional response of greed.

I am a human and seem to function in a very odd emotional way, not one that I can trust that much. And it isn’t a matter of intelligence, of being smart or stupid, is is a matter of emotion. And yet I blindly have emotional faith in one thing after another and I should understand, at least, other people whom I disagree with who do the same thing.

And as I finish writing this I look at my email, Airbnb sends me a message that my full refund has been granted and I have full faith in Airbnb again.