The Corpus Callosum

Many years ago, I was browsing thought the Borders bookstore, one of the earliers ones, on State Street in Ann Arbor, and encountered a book about psychotherapy.  It claimed to be a sort of encyclopedia of named styles of psychotherapy.  I can't recall the number of them, but I think it was between 300 and 400.  That was 20 years ago.  I'm sure it is in the thousenads by now.  

Of course most of these are merely variations of just a few themes.  And most have not been validated systematically.  

One of these is called Core Belief Engineering.  The basic principles are sound.  The only quibble I have is that most psychotherapy will involve changing core beliefs, so there seems to be little point in splitting that off and giving it a separate name.

Probably the name serves to give the approach a certain degree of curb appeal, and prima facie validity.  

Anyway, the idea is that people hold certain beliefs that tend to shape their behavior in important, systematic ways.  

For example, if a person finds that they keep dating other people who turn out to be untrustworthy, it may be that they have a core belief that no one is honorable in romantic contexts.  That belief may shape their behavior, such that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.  By being suspicious, hypervigilant, and constantly seeking reassurance, they drive people away.  This simply reinforces the belief.

That is only one example.  There are many ways that this plays out.

Nowhere is this more evident that in politics.

Politicians usually will tell you what their core beliefs are.  This is a problem, since much of what they say in  not true.  However, by examining their behavior for patterns, it is possible to discern the core beliefs.  Then, you can figure out if the beliefs they profess, are in fact the beliefs that are guiding their behavior.

It sometimes helps to look at some examples.  Say a politician  claims to be "pro-life."  Let us imagine that said politician refuses to sign the ban on land mines, the ban on cluster bombs, the ban on chemical weapons, the ban on torture, and mounts a war of choice that kills tens of thousands of people, vastly increases childhood hunger and mortality, causes cholera outbreaks, and creates over two million refugees.

In that case, it is safe to say that the core beliefs have been misrepresented.

However, sometimes the core beliefs are exactly what they are said to be.

 Let's say that a politician claims to hold this belief: that government is always inefficient and incompetent; government is not the solution, it is the problem.  One could test the validity of this claim by examining the behavior.

If a politician acts in ways that cause government to be inefficient and incompetent -- to be the problem and not the solution -- then that would constitute evidence that the politician has portrayed his or her belief honestly.

Such a core belief may, for example, cause one to appoint the former Judges and Stewards Commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association to head a national emergency management agency (working with a Deputy Director who used to be a TV news anchorman); or, to appoint a Secretary of Labor who thinks that states should be able to opt out of the minimum wage law; assign a corporate lobbyist to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission (thus replacing someone who had managed to generate just one rule change in four years of service); appoint the former ambassador to the Vatican to head the department of Veteran's Affairs; appoint a vice-president of Monsanto to be the Deputy Administrator at the EPA; appoint a mining-industry lobbyist to be Secretary of the Interior; appoint a coal-industry executive to be Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety.  And so on.

I suppose honesty is a good thing, so we should be quick to praise, even re-elect, a politician who is honest about at least one of his core beliefs.  It turns out that that is exactly what we have done.