Nobody Thinks About Anything

Admittedly, the title puts forth a grandiose claim. I’ll save you the trouble: it is incorrect. People do think about things, but the point is that most of us exist in incredible cognitive dissonance.

Our belief in fundamental human rights is a pretty good example. Most people believe that human beings are endowed with certain inalienable rights. Fair. But many of these people also like the idea of nonbelief in an absolute. While not necessarily moral relativism, it amounts to it in practice. That is to say, “God does not exist” amounts to “let them believe what they believe  as long as they are not hurting anyone because there is no objective basis for believing one opinion more than another” when expressed in the real world.

Human rights and soft moral relativism do not, at first glance, seem to be hugely problematic when held by the same person. The reality, however, is that they are. Human rights can only exist if drawn from an absolute source. Call that source God; call it L. Ron Hubbard. That doesn’t matter. What does matter is that without an objective, absolute basis, human rights simply become a construct. We are biologically unequal; something else has to make us truly so. The problem with constructs is that you can’t make someone else obey your construct. It’s essentially an opinion. No God means no real basis for human equality and thus human rights. So, in certain minds, they are essentially a sham. Without an absolute, we have no meaningful way of saying that North Korea is wrong or that anyone’s policy toward anything is wrong. Everything is simply a construct of culture and chemistry.

So this means that many people live with pretty bad cognitive dissonance. They want human rights to be an enforceable idea along with their nonbelief. Unfortunately, once we decline to believe in any absolute or transcendent force or principle, we bankrupt the notion that anyone is intrinsically owed anything. Constructs can’t make us give anything to anyone because they must be chosen. We can do whatever we want to others.

My point here is not to pick on atheists or even the U.N. The point is that we often hold beliefs that we don’t properly examine. We hold premise A and premise B, which are actually mutually exclusive, both to be true. Socrates would not be pleased.