Sources Aren’t Really That Important
In school, one of my favorite assignments was to write papers. Why? I like the sound of my own narrative voice. But that’s not the point. Even though papers were among my favorite and easiest-to-accomplish assignments, there usually came a page at the end of every paper that was a total bore: author sources.
Sources. It’s as if the whole paper would have been unsubstantiated without them, regardless of actually having used the sources or not. When I wrote for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, I was encouraged to offer evidence to support my opinion.
I did. Was it enough support for the people who disagreed with me? No. They still wanted to see more support and hear why I believed certain things, despite the fact that I’d just inserted infinity times as many sources as many other community columns.
Why? There’s a peculiar phenomenon going on here. It’s cognitive dissonance. What is cognitive dissonance?
Well, let’s use an example. Pretend you’re an atheist. Suddenly, one day, you turn on the news, and it turns out that a scientist has irrefutably proved the existence of God. It’s being hailed as the greatest scientific discovery of all time, and every single scientist on Earth is accepting it as proven fact. What do you do?
Chances are, you don’t convert to theism - at least not right away. Despite all the evidence in the world, your brain - which has invested a significant amount of energy in establishing the “atheist” identity - will being to find answers for why this must be “wrong.”
How do I know? Well, aside from the fact that someone has already proven God’s existence and there are still atheists, it’s because it’s often a habit to have cognitive dissonance when confronted with new ideas. (By the way, if you’re an atheist, you’re looking up that link and saying, “hey, that’s wrong!” See? Told you.)
Since I’m feeling philosophic today, here’s a story I find very interesting.
There once was a scorpion that needed to get across a river. He saw a nearby frog, and called to it, saying “I can’t swim, carry me across the river.”
The untrusting frog, keeping a safe distance, replied, “I can’t carry you across the river. You’ll sting me.”
The scorpion said, “but if I sting you, I’ll drown, and we’ll both die. Why would I do that?”
The frog considered it and decided it made sense. So he went over to the scorpion, which climbed on the frog’s back, and started to carry him across the river.
Halfway across the river, the scorpion stung the frog.
Sinking, the frog asked, “why did you sting me when you know that now we’ll both drown?”
The scorpion replied, “because - it is my nature.”
Facts are facts, but statistics can lie. That’s why I hate the idea of “sources.” If someone comes seeking an argument, they’ve already shown that they’re “scorpions.” Not that they’re evil, just that they’ve shown their nature. They ask me for sources and evidence, they ask me what I think of something unrelated to the topic. They ask me to go tour New Orleans, even though my column wasn’t about Hurricane Katrina. I know it’s wasted effort, because they’ll still confront me after the fact and continue to argue. It’s in their nature.
The fact that they have a name for something like cognitive dissonance means there are a lot of people out there who are willing to throw out evidence that their beliefs are incorrect. If you consider yourself open-minded, you may be especially susceptible to it, because you don’t think you do it.
If I’m right, then why offer people any evidence on your side at all? Well, for a number of reasons. The sport of argument. Or at least to lay another brick in their foundation if they’re coming around to your side.
To actually convince people of something, it needs to be said over and over. I got a new pair of shoes that gave me blisters, but since I always wear them, instead of blisters, I now have callouses and can’t feel a thing. Repetition over time = progress.
This is how brainwashing works, and it’s why people will accept your argument whether you’re right or not - if you do it correctly. And doing it correctly doesn’t involve “sources,” no matter how much Academia needs them to sleep at night.
Generally, if you want to prove something to somebody, more relies on your audience than on your facts.
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