Useful Lies and Our Uneasy Grasp of the Truth

In this episode of the M3 Bearcast, host Malcolm Travers asks a deceptively simple question: Is truth always worth believing? — and discovers the answer is messier than it looks. Inspired by a TikTok deep-thinker’s take on conspiracy culture, Malcolm flips the usual inquiry (“Why do people swallow obvious falsehoods?”) into its mirror image: Why do most of us cling to truths at all, when well-placed fictions can be far more useful?
Optical illusions set the stage. “The Dress” and a sneaky rotating-window trick show how our brains gladly trade accuracy for survival-ready shortcuts, heightening contrast or inventing 3-D depth when it counts. The same mental sleight-of-hand, Malcolm argues, fuels patriotism, religion, and conspiracy lore: myths that bind armies, comfort families, or make political chaos feel tidy. He revisits personal rabbit holes—from theories about MLK’s assassination to 9/11 plots—and admits that community, not evidence, often decides which stories stick.
Rather than shaming believers, Malcolm calls for curiosity: What purpose does a given myth serve? Until society offers sturdier safety nets and meaning-making tools, he suggests, illusions—like ghost stories reshaped by early film—will keep proving their pragmatic worth. The episode ends with a nod to listeners: rate, share, and, if the spirit moves you, support Male Media Mind on Patreon.

Transcript

  📍  📍  Hello, and welcome to the M three Bear Cast. My name is Malcolm Traver. Male Media Mind is a grassroots organization dedicated to uplifting and unifying our community through dialogue, insight, creativity, and knowledge. And on the M three Bear cast, I dive deeper into some of the topics that I bring up on my M three livestream. That's on youtube.com/mail. MediaMind two. And this one is about whether or not our beliefs are true or simply useful. The concept came up when a content creator had a video about why people dive into conspiracy type thinking. And often people ask, how can people believe such outrageous things that are seemingly obviously untrue. But he decided to turn that question on its head and ask. Why do we mostly believe in true things when there are clearly examples where believing in false things might actually be more useful? And I go down the rabbit hole about certain ideas that are not true, but that are useful, particular, particularly in the realm of optical illusions. There's one example that I didn't get into in the live stream dealing with hashtag the dress the one that was either blue and black or white and gold, and the perception of light based on whether or not you believed it was in shadow or whether it was indirect light. And the fact is that people could look at the same picture and see different things and oftentimes. I could not see it in any sort of different way. To be honest, I can't remember whether or not the dress really was blue and black. I think it was. But the fact is that so many people saw it as white and gold, that it might as well have been both at the same time, depending on who was looking at it and their life experiences when looking at photographs such as those, believing whether or not the dress was in shadow or not. I believe if you believed it to be in a shadow, then it appeared to be white and gold, where I believe it was actually a blue and black dress, indirect light. The funny thing is there was a another optical illusion that you won't be able to hear in the audio broadcast, but I think it's pretty well explained, and it's the idea that our eyes create, a heightened contrast between light and dark shades. I. And that is for our survival so that we can determine the foreground from the background better. And the same could be said of three Dene, three dimensional drawings that are flat. They appear three dimensional to us because seeing things in three dimensions matters to us more than, determining flat objects accurately. So accuracy is not necessarily the most important feature that our brain needs or uses to determine a very complex system of visual perception. And the same could be said of our understanding of the world at large, that we see things intellectually in terms of heuristics and shortcuts that are useful to us. And we often believe things that are not true, but that are useful for, say social cohesion patriotism and religion and ingroup, outgroup dynamics are a good example. They may not necessarily be true in the strict. Evidence-based way, but they're true and useful in a social sense. I'm gonna have this play, this conversation that I had from the M three live stream and I hope you enjoy it. 

So there's this content creator that I enjoy on TikTok. Jason k Paren, I think, I don't know how it's pronounced, but he's a science fiction writer. He does a lot of really interesting deep thoughts posts. He does some really silly stuff too, and I've played so many of his videos on here. I'm clearly a fan of just his weird thinking. And he has a video that I'm about to play that he is just talking about, watching a video on YouTube about conspiratorial thinking. Okay. And, he often asked the question if, have you known someone, whoever went down that rabbit hole of conspiratorial thinking, you saying maybe one way to think about it is not, why do people believe such weird things is, turn on its head is why do most of us want to believe in the truth? Because as he said he's gonna say in the video, which is. The truth isn't always the most advantageous thing to believe. And I want to tell you some of, I guess some of the thoughts that I had after watching this video changed my perspective on some things. So let me scroll down and actually find the video.

Here we go. Have you ever lost a friend or a family member down a conspiracy rabbit hole? Like maybe watch their social media just get slowly taken over by memes about 5G or QAN I or whatever. I personally think everybody misunderstands how this works. And this came to mind because there's a video going around right now by contra points, maybe the best of the YouTubers, and it's a nearly three hour long exploration of the conspiracy mindset and culture. But there's a really simple question that never really comes up in this video and that never really comes up in discussions about this, which is not why do people believe in weird conspiracy theories? It's why does anybody believe the truth? And the answer to this is actually not obvious. Let me explain. If I ask you what advantage is there to believing the truth, you're gonna say obviously if you have two houses that catch on fire and in one house is a person who correctly knows that you throw water on the fire to put it out. And in the other house is a person who has believed a conspiracy theory that says the only way to put out fire is to sing a song to it. It's the person who knew the truth about fire, who's going to survive. Just from an evolutionary point of view, the truth is always better. So it's weird that some people choose to believe something else, but we intentionally chose a scenario there where believing the truth is the thing that will save you. So the question is, are there times when a lie would do better? For example, let's imagine there is a war, and on one side of the war, the soldiers are told the whole story. They're taught that this war is complicated. There's a lot of nuance, there's a lot of right and wrong on both sides. Both sides have competing claims that they can logically defend. And the soldiers on the other side, they're just human beings like you. And when you kill them, they have grieving parents and friends back home who will miss them. But the foot soldiers on the other side are taught something very different. They're taught your enemies are monsters. They are literally inhuman monsters. The troops on the other side eat babies, and if you don't stop them, they will eat your babies. Also, if you die on the battlefield in the afterlife, you will inherit a giant castle made of gold. In fact, for every enemy soldier you take out is another golden castle you will get in eternity. In that war. Which side do you think is going to fight harder? Which side is going to persist through fatigue and fear? This is not a hypothetical. You can open a history book, you can go to the training of any army in the world. They are not teaching the foot soldiers nuance. Everybody already believes that lies survey purpose. If they help you survive and they help you win, and as a result, basically every single person watching this believes something that either is not true or they can't be proven. You are part of a religion that requires you to believe in unseen, invisible things, gods and angels or other forces, or you believe in astrology and that the stars have some sort of invisible power over our lives. Or you believe in some kind of a mythology, like the idea that economically everybody was better off in the past. This is objectively not true, but people believe it for a reason. My friends were all over social media during the election spreading a meme about JD Vance and a sofa. They knew it wasn't true. That didn't matter. All that matters is that we win. So the question is not why do people fall down the rabbit hole of believing some kind of a mythology? The question is how are people choosing their mythology? Because apparently everybody has at least one. So the question of why did they choose this theory to believe in, could just as easily be turned around to ask why do you believe in yours? Yeah, I was gonna say that one of the most obvious reasons why is that it's a community, but people. And if you feel accepted by people who are believing the same things it can be comforting. Yeah. A lot of times, I think a lot of conspiracy theories are about secret knowledge that makes the world feel a little more, make sense? Yes. So one of the ones that, most recently came up had to do with the election and somehow Elon Musk using starlink to, steal votes for Trump. And, my first thought was like, I don't want to be like them. That's one reason why I pushed back against it so quickly, but to be, if I was being honest with myself, like when I first read that headline about him winning the election, I said, this can't be true. This isn't real. I don't believe it. I had to go into, oh my God, this is actually happening. Yeah. And then I, I did do a little de depth reading about all the counties and, saw a county by county breakdown of which counties went for Trump, and it was so overwhelmingly read. And if you then looked at it, which counties went, moved toward Trump, there were very few counties, maybe less than 5% that moved toward the Democrat. It really didn't matter if it was Kamala or or Joe Biden, really, any Democrat would've lost that election based on that, on those numbers. But, a conspiracy theory makes the world seem like it makes more sense, yeah, it's true. And and so I guess, even though I do push back on people who espouse the conspiracy theory. That somehow some way a, an internet service company, had something to do with flash drives. 'Cause it should be noted that no election results are transmitted to any county or official over the internet. They actually, even though electronic ones are put onto flash drives and mailed to a central office, Yeah. With paper backups and, and and, originals are kept at the location like, and they can be compared to one another. And believe you, that everyone checked that shit in every county. And it wasn't just because Democrats wanted to make sure that this motherfucker actually won. Yeah. But the Republicans were, at 10, 10 fire alarm about. Possible election rigging. So everybody was checking it. And it obviously is not true, but I think I understand and I wanted to posit a couple other theories that I had early on in my life that I believe with that full har wholeheartedness, but certainly was curious about. So my first one was a conspiracy theory about the assassination of Martin Luther King. Okay. And I read this book, it was called Orders to Kill, and it was a conspiracy theory book about the idea that the FBI or, ordered his assassination. In that book, there was a lot of true information about COINTELPRO and their assassinations of different leaders, especially people who were considered communists throughout the world. And because of. The fact that Martin Luther King definitely delved in communism, and he did. The March on Washington were jobs and freedom was about a universal basic income. It is very communism like and that's the idea that a War on Poverty was literally a yeah, UBI and he had people within his circle who were part of the Communist party, not just communist beliefs, but actual carrying communists. And so it, I could see them making the connections to, okay, they've done, they've assassinated communist leaders. Using Quintel Pro. Like I could see them making that leap. But all of the evidence that ultimately would connect the FBI to his assassination was if he, at best, but the book was fascinating and I definitely went down that rabbit hole and I can understand even to this day if people believe it, because we shouldn't put it past them, because they've done worse. They did it by the way, they tried to basically blackmail him, with a recording of him having sex with one of his mistresses. And they gave him like a gun and said, kill yourself. They wanted him to, they thought they could kill himself. Yeah. Which is to me, an assassination attempt if you're trying to blackmail someone into killing themselves. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it's not crazy. But yeah. And the other one was the nine 11 conspiracy theories. Oh. Just because, yeah, I went down that rabbit hole. I watched a bunch of movies about it. I don't know, I was just, eventually I just said what happened to the planes? Put bombs in the building. I was just like, the build the plane still flew into the buildings. I don't get it. I don't mean eventually I was just like, it doesn't make much sense. But, it was a lot of antisemitism tied into it, like israel somehow, coordinated with the US government to do this so that they could do something. I, it was all, the reasoning was just off, but nine 11 was one of those things that was so surreal to me watching it, it was like a sense of horror that I had not experienced in my life. Up to that point. Yeah. I don't think any of us had at that point. Yeah. It was crazy. Yeah. So like I was ready to believe in something that made that make sense. I don't know. That being said I I sometimes swung hard towards condemning anyone who believed in conspiracy theories or anyone who believed in religious ideas that were outrageous. 'cause I think another thing that happened to me after nine 11 was I lost my faith. When I recognized that a lot of the terrorism was produced by other faiths, and I just realized oh, this is fucked up. I had swung back towards believing in faith, especially for this reason, which is that I do think, and I was reading, I think it was Noah Harra who wrote Sapiens and he was talking about how religion and storytelling. Is such an integral part of what makes us human. And religion is a huge part of that storytelling. It's what makes us people instead of individuals, yeah. Before there were governments, there were stories about our tribes, there were stories about what made us human. There were stories about the gods that, you know animated nature, animism was probably the first type of religion, the god or the first sun gods and wind gods and the ocean gods, they were just stories that humanized, very, chaotic world and that is very useful, and so if you, if there are stories and there are people you can then give, chaotic things agency and. Add this information into a story that will help you remember what to do in certain circumstances. And yes, none of that is true, but it is useful. It is incredibly useful. And they're just saying I still see it as that. And then I saw another content creator talking about how to be a hardcore atheist who rigidly antagonizes religious people is like one of the most white privileged things you can do. And the reason being is that these countries that have high levels of atheism, like these Nordic religions, Nordic countries norway and Denmark and Switzerland or wherever, all these countries have an incredible amount of wealth and privilege that makes it unnecessary. To lean on such stories and religions and and, people forget that, that you, there was a utility to those stories and to the community that those things created. And so I just don't, I don't see the point in trying to dissuade someone from their faith anymore, because instead I think I get a little curious my question is, what do you get out of this? What does what is this story giving to you? Obviously we can't prove any of this to be true, but, is there anything that I'm missing? So anyway. Yeah. Yeah. And it, and even I guess in Hollywood, I guess you could say. I remember when Bill Cosby, was facing all those charges and people were coming up with conspiracy theories about how, I think even a friend of the show p Candy off that says they did that because he was trying to buy NBC. And, I'm just like where is this coming from? But I, we've heard stories like that. Like with P Diddy, like with r Kelly, anytime, one of us are in trouble, I. I think sometimes our community will like we can't believe that this is possible. This just cannot be true. And so I think that kind of leans into, we gotta find something to believe in that. Oh, this is a setup. This is something that's not true. So we gotta come up with some reasoning for it. And it was ai, it was, done, they got a super computer to put images, I'll never forget remember what's the guy's name? Oh oh gosh, his show Dave Chappelle. Oh yeah. And he would always do the skit about r Kelly. And he was like, that wasn't me. That wasn't me. I never peed on nobody. That was all video tricks and stuff like that. And then I. They ended up like shooting water on this woman. It's see, I didn't do that. That was all ai that was a video image. That was trickery. That was camera tricks and stuff like that. So yeah, I think that leads credence into they just wanna believe something and it's they just don't wanna believe us about, their idols or, their favorite rapper or singer or anything like that. So they're gonna come up with some sort of reasoning that they can hold onto be like, that's what it is. It can't be this, it has to be this has to be the truth. And that's what I'm gonna stand on. Yeah. I think this was true of a lot of sexual assault egal allegations. Prior to the Me Too movement. The reason why that was a thing was that I think a lot of women were rightfully afraid to bring forward any of those allegations simply because Exactly. They were mostly not believed and, they had really good reasons not to exactly. Now I wanted to say one thing that was interesting. I an anti conspiracy theory that I'm gonna bring it up in a little bit. It was about something called Fantasma. Goria. Fantasma Goria was a type of movie before there was moving pictures, before there were before talkies, as they say, where the movies actually had, audio synced with the film. There was this type of movie called Fantasma Goria where it was supposed to, people were tell ghost stories or whatever, and you'd see pictures on the screen of people in parks or whatever, and they would slide an image, like a transparency of another person on top of it. And they were supposed to be a ghost. And they'd be like, ah, then, you scared the audience. And they were, ah, it's so silly. It was like, whatever, but imagine you remember those old things that the that you had at school the transparency thing that they, the teacher would have on the it was like that. Yeah. Just now what's interesting about Phantasmagoria is that it absolutely changed the way we think about ghosts. So ghosts are a phenomenon that has existed throughout human history. We see dead people. We do, we as human beings see dead people, but the way that we see dead people changed after FHAs Mago to be transparent and, moving through walls and things like that. Because that was what we thought now about what ghosts were. We thought of them as, in Poral or whatever. Before that, we just saw people, we just saw dead people, like solid. Form dead people that would just pop up the room. So that tells us something about how that phenomenon works. It's something that our mind projects onto the world, we could call it a hallucination, but there are persistent hallucinations caused by grief, or by fear or paranoia, but they are a part of what it means to be human. And so I think going to some of the movies that are about paranormal phenomenon, I think the scariest and most unnerving movies are the ones where one person can see the. The ghost or the phenomenon, and no one else can see it and everyone thinks that they're going crazy. That's how it really works. Yeah. That's how it really works. Exactly. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna show a couple videos that are about phenomenon that are not seeing dead people. This one is simultaneous brightness contrast

So a quick note for my audio listeners. The video that I'm about to show has a gray dot that is moved on a background that is a shades of gray from very light to very dark. And as you move the gray dot, it appears to change color. So as the gray dot goes to a background that is more light, it becomes darker. And as it moves towards a gray, that's much darker background. It becomes lighter. And then in the video he shows that in reality, the dot doesn't change by showing a gray line that moves all the way from the light side to the dark side. I.

is just the phenomenon that if you have let me just play it because he's gonna explain it. This optical illusion is called simultaneous brightness Contrast. The dot appears to become brighter as I move it up and darker as I move it down. Even though its color never changes, and believe it or not, we still don't know what causes it. All we know is that somehow, somewhere in the brain we forfeit truth for exaggerated contrast difference. Recent studies have suggested that we may be born to make this mistake and that makes sense. It may be an error, but it may also help us more quickly distinguish features in the environment. Natural selection may have favored this over accuracy because sometimes it's more important to live than to see reality as it is. This is basic idea in the visual field, like you were saying, like anything in the visual field is tuned by your brain to help you see what it is. Yeah. In fact, like when we think about animals and the color that certain fruits and animals have. Is based on our relationship to them. So bright red is one of those things that helps it stand out in a green background. Yeah. And it's like that fruit was basically co-evolved with other mammals to advertise itself to mammals. Here eat me. And and thinking about like tigers when they have these stripes and they're bright orange to us, just like, why would something that's a predator be so bright and obvious to see, but the prey animals that they prey upon, that stripe pattern confuses their motion sensors for whatever reason. And it allows them to move slowly and, methodically toward their prey without being seen. And something about that bright orange. Just they see colors differently. They have a completely different spectrum of colors. We sometimes, people would say the animals are colorblind. Colorblind, but that's not what it's just that their concept of color is just completely different. Different, yeah, exactly. Who knows what they have, what we would call green is, who knows? It just isn't it's probably not even comparable. But here's another one. This one has to do with three dimensional awareness. So this is a flat surface. I'm spoiling it. Let me just play it. Here we go. What do you see? There's a window and it's turning. Except it stops and reverses direction. So the window is oscillating back and forth. That's what most people see when they look at this illusion, except that's not what the window's actually doing. It's on this turntable and it is rotating continuously. The window itself is not a rectangle, but a trapezoid. You can see this side here is much shorter than this side over here, and that is essential to the illusion. Also essential it is shaded to make it look 3D, but it's actually just a two dimensional card with the same image on both sides. So now that you know exactly what this object looks like and what it's doing, can you correctly perceive the rotation rather than the oscillation? I still can't. Okay, here's an idea. I'm going to attach this Rubik's cube to the short side of the trapezoid so we can keep track of it. As it goes around, okay, the Rubik's cube is going around. Everything seems normal, but now what is that? It looks like the Rubik's cube is continuing to go around, but the window is oscillating back and forth. There goes the Rubik's cube around the back. I don't even know what's happening. Whoa, look at that. It looks like the Rubik's cube is out drifting by itself out in front of the whole illusion. What is happening? God isn't that crazy though? Our brain, that is crazy. Our brain prioritizes three dimensional ideas over flat ideas, but if you draw something with like parallel lines to simulate a three dimensional space. We prefer to believe that it's three dimensional, because that is advantageous to our survival, yeah. If you perceive a flat surface, no biggie if it's a three dimensional surface and something's coming at you, like we just, yeah, exactly. Yeah. We prioritize what's more likely to help us survive. And so I think that's true of like conspiratorial thinking as well. These sort of conspiracies and religions and, occult thinking and group thinking, all that. And I think that is a really good thought to have if get into some sort of thought pattern is is this useful? Is this gonna help me? Whether it's true or not is important. I think it's important to think about true things, but. This, does this help me survive? Like in both of those illusions it would probably be nice to be able to break those illusions. Yes. But those illusions are much more important to our survival that they remain illusions. Yeah. And it just is. And that, that gives me comfort for some reason. Sometimes illusions are to our advantage. I don't know. Do we have any comments or questions though? Yes, we do. Let's see, let's start with Sammy. Hey, how's Sammy? How you doing? Sammy says, not eating babies. Eating the dogs and cats must be a snack. Oh, yeah. Eating the opponent. Eat your babies. Yeah, exactly. Yikes. A welcome, sir. Good evening, gentlemen. And tchaa. Don't wish Alah. Good evening. He's salty at me for today for some reason. I don't know. I don't know what's wrong with him. Alex says, Malcolm, it sounds like you're saying religion is being used to justify purpose, especially when there's so much bleak around a group of people. That could be, yeah. It could be that you're not ready to accept the bleakness yet. Like if there's, if it's a lot to deal with, like maybe ignoring it is okay. Like right now I'm not paying attention to politics. I'd rather not, it's to my survival advantage to not pay attention to that right now. And I thought about it with my grandmother whenever she was stressed out or something was horrible, I. She just starts singing spirituals, be like, oh, Jesus. Just rocking. She would just ignore the whole world and just get into some, old negro spirituals. I'm like, you know what? That is so useful. I need to do that. It's it could be considered a form of therapy. It's like they don't wanna think about this stuff. So it's I'm just gonna turn it over to Jesus, Lord, turn it over to the Lord and just, forget about it and say my hymnals and Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah. Fuck it. I can admit that I can't handle everything, shit. Exactly. But when there's an abundance of wealth and prosperity over a long period of time, the need to look towards a deity shrinks significantly. It does. Yeah. I think that's why that a lot of people have said that, like they believe that religion is on a decline. As, and I think the thing is. As it's on the decline, what people are calling deconstruction needs to happen, which is we need to find tools that were in those religious traditions that can help us soothe, and how we can, I don't know, come to peace with some of those things that were helpful to us and maybe find analogous tools that are outside of these belief systems and so that we don't have to be repulsed by fact claims that we know not to be true or, just tall tales that just don't really resonate with us anymore. But I think this is one of, one of the ways that I'm deconstructing. 'cause I, like I said, I left religion maybe 20 years ago, but I, I recognize that there are stories that bring me comfort that I know not to be true. I always said I don't have to believe. Peter Parker to, believe that with great power comes great responsibility, just saying like they're, they can be fictional stories and still teach you something. Yeah. Yeah, but the thing is, when we believe them to be true, they have a tendency to spread more. They tend to stick, be stickier more. And so I think there has to be this sort of overwhelming abundance, like you said of support systems to support people coming out of religion. I don't expect, or I don't think we even need to, like berate people to leave religion until there is that support system there for them in the form of, say, mental health or a, mental health professionals or a social support system that understands how to be, to deal with vulnerability. And talk with people about their feelings and not try to fix them, so all those sorts of things have to be in place. Gotcha. Yeah. Social safety. Yeah. Sammy says, or a folks, sometimes folks themselves begin to assume deity status until shown otherwise. Even then, it's hard for them to accept their normalcy. Yeah. There are political religions. There are definitely, cults of personality. Yeah, for sure. And that is real. Yeah. I don't wanna, I don't wanna bring us up again, but we've got one who.

Yeah, this is true. This is true all. So thank you guys for the comments too. 

All right. And that will  📍 do it for this episode of the M three Bear Cast. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a rating on your favorite podcast catcher, I believe, Spotify. You can put stars, give us thumbs up on Apple Podcast. Share this on social media and if you would like to. Be a donor and a financial supporter of male media Mind, go to patreon.com/male MediaMind. As a patron, you'll get access to our telegram groups, our Discord server, and early access to the podcast, as well as after shows from our live streams. Again, thank you for listening, and we'll catch you in the next episode. Peace.