Thought Crime

1. The Concept of “Thought Crime”

The term is of course from George Orwell’s 1984, in which people are arrested for thinking thoughts that fail to align with the party’s ideology. More generally, we can think of “thought crime” as consisting of (alleged) moral wrongs that consist in having illicit beliefs or belief-forming tendencies which are serious enough to deserve punishment.

The paradigm uses of the term “thought crime” are in scare quotes — i.e., the “thought crimes” are things that some ideology deems it wrong to think, where the person using the term does not agree with that ideology.

2. Examples

2.1. Wokism

Today, right-wing people are most likely to describe left-wing people as believing in thought crime. For example, to disagree that transwomen are women is to commit a thought crime. Another thought crime is to think that population-level differences in IQ have a partly genetic basis. In fact, it might even be a thought crime to believe that those differences exist at all. (So if you want to be moral, you better not read about IQ test results.) The main emotional reaction for a wokist hearing of such ideas is not a sense of factual error — it is not like how you feel when you see someone miscalculate a string of numbers. The main emotional reaction is righteous anger at the immorality of those thoughts and a desire to suppress them through force. Wokists believe that people who harbor such sinful thoughts should be fired from their jobs, mobbed on the internet, and exiled from society.

2.2. Marxism

The Marxist regimes in the 20th century had a notion of thought crimes, where they would arrest people and send them to gulags or reeducation camps for disagreeing with the official ideology of the state. This is doubtless what inspired Orwell to depict the thought crime enforcers of 1984.

2.3. Christianity

But the notion of thought crime was not invented by censorious leftists. It was invented by religious people. In traditional Christian doctrines, “faith” is said to be a key moral virtue. Conversely, unbelief is said to be punished by eternal torment, which seems a bit harsh.

(The official theory is not that you’re sent to hell for disbelief, but that you’re sent to hell for all your sins; it’s just that you can’t be forgiven for those sins unless you actively accept God’s forgiveness, which requires you to believe that God exists. It remains a mystery why you should not be able to accept that forgiveness after God proves to you that he exists.)

2.4. Islam

Islam likewise predicts eternal torment for people who disagree with Islam. Unbelief is said to be the worst evil:

Sura 8:55: “Indeed, the worst of all beings in the sight of Allah are those who persist in disbelief, never to have faith”

Sura 22:19-22: “as for the disbelievers, garments of Fire will be cut out for them and boiling water will be poured over their heads, melting whatever is in their bellies, along with their skin. And awaiting them are maces of iron. Whenever they try to escape from Hell—out of anguish—they will be forced back into it, ˹and will be told,˺ ‘Taste the torment of burning!’”

2.5. Conservatism?

Are there any thought crimes recognized by conservatives? Certainly there are thoughts they would disapprove of and whose expression would anger them — say, the thought that the United States is evil and a valid target for terrorist attacks. But it’s rare for conservatives to call for punishing someone for thought crime. Why?

One reason might be that most conservatives already have another belief system that is more important to them than their political views: their religion. Thus, the real thought crimes are those defined by God, and it falls to God to punish them.

3. Can Thoughts Be Illicit?

3.1. Immoral Irrationality

Can it ever be immoral to have or fail to have a particular belief? Many philosophers think that beliefs are not under our voluntary control; hence, it would seem that no one can be blamed for their beliefs or failures to believe. For example, I cannot now believe in Christianity, given the shortage of evidence that I have for it; hence, it would be unfair for God to blame me for that lack of belief.

But even if beliefs are not under direct voluntary control, everyone agrees that some things that affect belief are under your control. For instance, you can choose whether to investigate a question thoroughly. You can choose whether to exert effort to avoid biases and to reason carefully about it. Suppose that everyone who investigates sufficiently thoroughly and tries sufficiently hard to reason correctly comes to conclusion P. In that case, a person might be blamed for believing ~P. If their belief then caused them to act in a way harmful to others, they might even merit punishment.

3.2. Immoral Rationality

However, this does not appear to be the case with any of the alleged thought crimes mentioned above, and this does not appear to be what the people who believe in thought crimes think. The people who condemn thought criminals do not seem to be criticizing epistemic irrationality or carelessness. Indeed, sometimes they seem to be criticizing epistemic rationality. E.g., some people’s understanding of the virtue of “faith” is that it requires firmly believing things in the absence of evidence, or at least with insufficient evidence.

Wokists are not yet saying that — they don’t outright say that you should adopt their beliefs on faith. But that often indeed seems to be how they hold their beliefs and how they want you to come to agree with them. What is the most common argument for believing that transwomen are women? The most common things I hear are all claims to the effect that it is harmful to transwomen to deny that they are women. What is the most common argument that there are no biologically based intelligence differences between groups? I think the most common argument is that to believe there are such differences is harmful and racist.

Anyway, in all of these cases — wokism, Marxism, Christianity, Islam — it is simply ridiculous to claim that anyone who investigates sufficiently carefully and thoroughly will agree with the belief system. There are perhaps some beliefs that are like that (say, the most well-established scientific theories), but these religions/ideologies are nothing like that.

Nor do the people who believe in thought crimes believe merely that you should be punished for taking harmful actions based on your bad belief (other than the action of expressing that belief). No, you merit punishment straight off, just for having the reviled belief.

This leaves a puzzle as to how the thought crimes are supposed to be crimes.

4. Why Do We Like the Idea of Thought Crime?

4.1. Shortage of Evidence

As I noted, the status of ‘thought crime’ does not in general attach to beliefs that are so conclusively refuted that anyone who investigates carefully will reject them. Indeed, it is precisely the opposite. It is precisely because epistemic reasons do not suffice to convince everyone of your belief that you attempt to convince them through moral exhortation. When the plea “Believe P because the evidence demonstrates it!” fails, then we resort to “Believe P because it is immoral to doubt it!” Indeed, you might reasonably take someone’s resort to moral exhortation as pretty strong evidence that they have a weak case, and they know it.

This leaves it puzzling, though, why the person holds the belief and wants you to hold it in the first place.

4.2. Memes

Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” for a mental replicator — an idea or practice that copies itself from one person to another. (Photos with funny captions are only one among many kinds of memes in this sense.) He meant this to be analogous to genes, with the implication that evolutionary explanations, analogous to those used to understand the traits of living organisms, could be applied to understanding systems of ideas.

4.3. Ideologies Are Mind Viruses

Viruses are quasi-organisms that take over your cells and use them to produce copies of themselves. The most successful viruses are ones that can easily transmit from one host to another. Some viruses also try to deactivate your immune system. (Some computer viruses also try to deactivate your anti-virus software.) You can see the obvious evolutionary explanation for such traits. Just as real organisms evolve, viruses evolve traits to maximize their survival and reproduction.

Ideologies are like viruses that take over your mind and use it to produce copies of themselves in other people. (Cf. Dawkins’ “Viruses of the Mind”.)

One useful trait for such a replicator is transmissibility: i.e., if you have the ideology, it makes you want to transmit the ideology to others. Another useful trait is the ability to deactivate the mind’s “immune response”, namely, skepticism or critical thinking.

4.4. Why Are We Susceptible to Mind Viruses?

Humans are susceptible to mind viruses because we have culture. We evolved (and here I mean biologically evolved) the capacity to absorb and transmit culture because this helped our ancestors survive — because we have culture, each generation need not learn anew all the practically important facts about their environment. We have a natural, genetically based tendency to share our beliefs with each other, and to absorb the beliefs and practices of others. If we had to wait till we had sufficient epistemic justification to believe what other people tell us, a lot of people would die during childhood.

The system is flawed because, in addition to transmitting useful information about the environment and successful practices, it also lets humans transmit erroneous, useless, and even harmful ideas. People sometimes acquire such ideas, whether through random error, motivated reasoning, or psychological disorders. They then sometimes transmit these ideas to other people, using the natural human tendency to trust one another’s words.

Most such erroneous ideas quickly die out. But occasionally a set of ideas appears that has enough mechanisms for encouraging its own reproduction and preventing itself from being criticized that it persists for long periods of time. That is what religions and ideologies are: mind viruses with sophisticated reproduction and self-defense mechanisms.

4.5. Thought Crime as an Adaptation

Enter the concept of thought crime: It’s an adaptation that helps a mental virus transmit itself to new hosts by hijacking humans’ innate moral sense. Because the host thinks everyone is morally required to hold this belief system, the host tries to make other people adopt the belief system, even to the point of punishing people for not adopting it.

At the same time, this idea deactivates your natural cognitive defense system, your capacity for critical reflection. Because you think that it is immoral to question the belief system, you studiously avoid doing so. You refuse to think about any anomalies or objections to the belief system. If someone tries to talk about such objections, you quickly try to silence them — both to prevent other people from hearing the immoral ideas and to prevent yourself from entertaining them. In the Middle Ages, you would silence the critics by arresting them and then burning them (see Giordano Bruno’s case). In 21st-century democracies, you silence them by literally shouting them down, deleting their social media accounts, trying to ruin their lives, and sometimes even physically attacking them.

5. Treatment for Cognitive Infections

Is there any treatment for mind viruses? As with physical viruses, some mental viruses are more responsive to treatment than others, and some patients are more treatable than others. Sometimes — particularly in the early stages — you can reason someone out of an ideology. Once the condition is fully developed, it usually becomes much harder, due to the belief system’s defenses.

Some medical therapies focus on trying to get your immune system to recognize a disease. E.g., immunotherapies try to get your immune system to recognize and target cancer cells. Vaccines help your immune system recognize viruses.

Perhaps a person’s cognitive defenses can be prepared to resist intellectual pathogens by informing the person about the nature of these pathogens and their defense mechanisms. This might even work on people who are already infected (though I anticipate a lower success rate). Perhaps if people intellectually understand how the belief system that has infected them is working to neutralize their natural defenses against error, they can overcome the virus.

That’s the best suggestion I can come up with. Are there any other treatments?