Your Brain Wants a Villain: Certainty is a Trap

Robotic Thinking

If any part of you is secretly rooting for Venezuela to blow up in Trump’s face, congrats, you just met your tribal brain at the door.

That part of the mind loves a cheap story. Heroes and villains. Pure good and pure evil. It wants the world to behave like a children’s cartoon because cartoons are easy to run in your head when you’re tired, angry, or afraid. And the cleanest cartoon is the one where Donald Trump is 100% wrong, so anything that hurts him (even if it harms millions) must be good.

That’s not morals. That’s dopamine. Its splitting.

“Splitting"

In psychology, we call this "splitting." It is a defense mechanism where the mind segregates people (or experiences) into all-good or all-bad categories because it lacks the emotional bandwidth to handle nuance. When you engage in splitting, you aren't analyzing policy; you are self-soothing.

Here is the annoying clinical truth: Humans do not come in 100% concentrations of anything. Not saints, not monsters. People are messy, chaotic systems. They can do the right thing for the wrong reasons, the wrong thing for the right reasons, and occasionally stumble into a successful outcome even if their brain was basically a raccoon rummaging through a policy dumpster.

So yes, you can believe (as I do) that Trump is a deeply flawed person and a dangerous president. You can believe the world is worse overall because of his tenure. And you can - and must - still admit that he will not be wrong 100% of the time.

You have to do this not because he "deserves nuance," but because reality does not care about your emotional need for a tidy villain. This is the same mental discipline as admitting your least favorite coworker can be right in a staff meeting. It makes your skin crawl. That visceral reaction is how you know you are training a real muscle.

To understand this, we have to look back at the people we loved, not just the ones we loathe.

I loved Barack Obama. And yet, I still wish he’d followed through on his "red line" in Syria. Not with a flag-planting crusade, but with a clear, sharp consequence for the use of chemical weapons. When you allow a dictator to use gas on civilians, you lose the moral high ground. You don’t get to hide behind "complexity" while people choke to death. Let the chips fall where they may, because a dictator willing to gas his own people is not "stability," it’s a hostage situation in a bespoke suit.

We also have to admit that many of us, Obama included, underestimated the volume of racial animus lurking in the drywall of American society.

The "birth certificate" movement wasn't just a quirky conspiracy fad. It was a social permission slip. It told millions of people, "You are allowed to see this man as illegitimate."

When we look at the data, the signals were there.

• During the height of the "Birther" controversy in 2011, a Gallup poll found that roughly 25% of Americans, and nearly 45% of Republicans, believed Obama was "definitely" or "probably" not born in the U.S.

• In 2016, studies utilizing the American National Election Studies (ANES) data found that racial resentment was a far more significant predictor of support for Trump than economic anxiety.

  
  

That crowd didn’t invent Trump; they primed the fuel. He just walked into the room with a match.

Acknowledging this doesn't require worshipping Obama, nor does it require pretending Trump has never stumbled into a reasonable policy position.

You can hold both thoughts without your skull cracking open. That ability to hold opposing tensions is the definition of adulthood.

Bayesian Thinking: The Antidote to Dogma

The deeper point here is bigger than politics. It is about how to think when your amygdala (the brain’s fear center) is trying to hijack the steering wheel.

The tribal mind wants a single story that explains everything. It wants one worldview to rule them all, and it wants that worldview to feel like “certainty.” The scientific mind doesn’t do that. The scientific mind treats worldviews like hypotheses and gives them probability weights.

That’s Bayesian thinking in plain clothes.

Not “I believe X.” More like “Given what I’ve seen so far, X is currently my best bet, but I’m updating.”

It’s how weather forecasts work. A hurricane track isn’t a single line because the atmosphere isn’t obligated to be simple. You get a cone of probability, and the cone narrows as data comes in. Anyone demanding a single perfect path is basically yelling at clouds for not being a spreadsheet.

It’s also how good investors survive. A serious investor doesn’t dump their entire life savings into one stock because they “feel sure.” They build a portfolio, they rebalance, they hedge, they accept uncertainty as the price of being sane. A belief system should be run more like a portfolio than like a marriage.

This is where a lot of people get science weirdly backward, because high school science education often accidentally trains students into a kind of fake certainty. It teaches a brittle story where “science” equals “prove the null hypothesis wrong” and anything else is fluffy. Then students grow up and either become dogmatic skeptics or nihilists.

The dogmatic skeptic is the person who treats the null hypothesis like scripture. If you can’t prove it in their preferred format, it’s dismissed as nonsense, even if it’s plausible and even if the evidence is pointing somewhere interesting.

The Nihilist is what happens when determinism gets taught as a personality instead of a model. It’s a short slide from “everything has a cause” to “nothing matters,” then to “morality is fake,” then to “people are just machinery,” which is the psychological on-ramp to dehumanization. That slide is not inevitable, but it’s common.

And yes, it makes my teeth grind because history shows where dehumanization goes when it gets social permission. Adolf Hitler didn’t need sophisticated philosophy to commit evil. He needed a story that made other humans feel like objects.

Quantum mechanics demonstrated that determinism is a simplistic fantasy. Reality is spookier and more interesting than that. It is fantasy to believe that the universe is a perfectly predictable clock if only you knew the initial conditions. Quantum theory bakes in genuine unpredictability in measurement outcomes, and different interpretations argue about what that means “under the hood.” But there is little evidence to support a clockwork universe.

Real scientific thinking takes unpredictability into account. It looks like this.

You generate multiple competing hypotheses.

You collect data that can actually discriminate between them.

You state your priors, meaning what you already believe and why.

You update your beliefs based on how well each hypothesis explains the data.

You repeat forever, because reality is not a one-shot exam.

That approach isn’t wishy-washy. It’s disciplined. It demands you admit when your favorite story is losing. It demands you resist the emotional high of certainty. It also makes you harder to manipulate, because propaganda thrives on forcing you into binary teams.

And once you get used to thinking this way, something else changes. You become genuinely open-minded, not the Instagram version where you “respect everyone’s beliefs” while silently thinking they’re idiots.

Actually open-minded means you can sit with the uncomfortable possibility that someone else’s spiritual or religious framework might be closer to the truth than yours in some ways. Not because you’re surrendering reason, but because you’re refusing to pretend you already own the full map of reality.

Stop treating your current worldview like it’s a throne. Treat it like a draft. Treat it like version 0.7 of your model of the universe, helpful, incomplete, and absolutely not entitled to final authority.

Politics becomes less intoxicating.

People that consider themselves students of science become less dogmatic.

Other humans become harder to flatten into caricatures.

And your tribal brain still gets say, but it doesn’t get to drive.