the timboucher experience

Karl Marx famously proclaimed religion to be the opiate of the masses, but I’m wondering if “the placebo of the masses” might have been a more logical choice. I’ve been thinking and reading a lot of different things about the importance of belief, and the role that it plays, specifically in how religions work (or don’t work) for people. Some people suggest that belief operates on a strictly biological basis. Similar to that, others “believe” that belief functions as a sort of stand-in for actual experience. But at times, this can become detrimental, because it shields people from experiences which negate or challenge these beliefs. I’ve also done a little bit of writing myself about how people may adopt beliefs because they are trying to “freeze” meaning into one specific form. I tend to think that each of these approaches offers something useful, but still something’s missing.

Whenever anyone writes on belief from an atheist, humanist or rationalist viewpoint, they usually seem to denigrate it rather heavily, as the ultimate foe of mankind. There is certainly substantial evidence that this is the case, whether you look at the vast course or history or modern life. But that said, I don’t think it’s something people can just spontaneously overcome; it’s inherent in us in some way. And then there are the people who will assert that, for example, people believe in god, because God is real. Whether or not that’s specious reasoning is debatable, but what is not is that whatever their nature or cause, beliefs do have an impact on people.

Whether religious or directed elsewhere, people seem to need a Great Pumpkin, something they can sit in the pumpkin patch all night waiting for. Maybe, then, beliefs work better placed alongside hopes and dreams, if we want to shed light on them. Medical science has been investigating the nature of belief for years. In fact, it’s part of pretty much all clinical trials for new drugs that are developed. Typically, an effectiveness of 25-30% is reported among people who receive placebo treatments in double-blind clinical studies. New drugs are usually measured in relation to how much higher their effectiveness rate is than the placebo.

This, to me, is rather remarkable, that a quarter of people with some degree of regularity essentially manage to improve themselves because they “believe” they are being helped. Improvements of these types are quite frequently objectifiably measurable as well. Common scientific thought seems to want to pick this placebo effect apart, and possibly overcome it in order to get more accurate studies. But even strenuous skeptics have been hard-pressed to do so:

A person’s beliefs and hopes about a treatment, combined with their suggestibility, may have a significant biochemical effect. Sensory experience and thoughts can affect neurochemistry. The body’s neurochemical system affects and is affected by other biochemical systems, including the hormonal and immune systems. Thus, it is consistent with current knowledge that a person’s hopeful attitude and beliefs may be very important to their physical well-being and recovery from injury or illness.

Studies which are done strictly on placebo effects in healing are even more intriguing:

And strangely, the placebo effect is not limited to the subjective sensations of patients; some studies show actual physiological change as a result of sham treatments. Doctors in one study successfully eliminated warts by painting them with a brightly colored, inert dye and promising patients the warts would be gone when the color wore off. In a study of asthmatics, researchers found that they could produce dilation of the airways by simply telling people they were inhaling a bronchiodilator, even when they weren’t. Patients suffering pain after wisdom-tooth extraction got just as much relief from a fake application of ultrasound as from a real one, so long as both patient and therapist thought the machine was on. Fifty-two percent of the colitis patients treated with placebo in 11 different trials reported feeling better — and 50 percent of the inflamed intestines actually looked better when assessed with a sigmoidoscope.

Also, check this research from 1998 about placebos & anti-depressants:

The effectiveness of antidepressants is mainly in the placebo effect of treatment, not in the medication itself, according to a new study by University of Connecticut psychologist Irving Kirsch. The results, published in Prevention & Treatment, indicate that 75 per cent of the response to medication for depression was a result of the patient being in treatment, while at most 25 per cent of the response was a true drug effect.

Obviously something’s going on here; the Great Pumpkin must be visiting some of these people. And we’re talking about the effects of belief on the body here, we’re not even yet considering how much more powerful the effects of belief on the mind and on behavior must be. I don’t know of a way to study that quantifiably, but pretty much all you have to do is look around: at the world, at history, at your family, your friends, yourself. Probably the hardest one to look at on that list though is yourself, because you’re too close to your beliefs. It’s very likely you can’t even see most of them, especially when they are crippling you somehow.

So what if you could take a placebo for your mind? One that operated directly on your beliefs - one that you could believe in, in other words. Something that when you believed in it, it would suffuse through your whole being, affecting your experience, your behavior, even your body. Essentially, I think this is what religion is meant to function as. Except the problem in modernity is that most people find traditional religion too impossible to believe in. The next runner up is usually scientific materialism which is the placebo operating upon our culture right now in force. It’s hooked into our veins our entire lives in public education, in our preparation for the workforce, in our being molded and maintained as producers and consumers of materials.

How come some people still figure out a way to take a God-based placebo though? Most people probably operate under a variety of placebos, but some people really seem to be absolutely filled with fervor about Jesus, and God, and a bunch of other stuff that others just perceive as meaningless or nonsensical. This makes me wonder more about those figures in the medical placebo studies. If 25% of people generally improve at least partially on placebos, are they just “better” at believing? They’re almost like superheroes with a mutant healing factor in a sense. I mean, it’s amazing they do that. Maybe the problem actually lies in the other percentage for whom the placebo didn’t do anything, because they couldn’t get themselves amped up enough about it.

I think perhaps the solution goes back to an older post of mine: Infinity, Idolatry & the Need for Form. To summarize, even when people think that God is omniscient or omnipresent, we’re not. Most people still need the outward signs: things like temples, prayers and rituals. They need containers or vehicles which will help them believe, and have the effects of those beliefs move through them. And then you have the iconoclasts, people who think focusing on these outward forms is wrong somehow, that the grace and magnificence of God should be enough for people. Does this struggle between iconoclasts and those who need the vehicle in order to reify their beliefs offer us some kind of clue about how the whole riddle of belief works? I think it must, although I’m not quite able to articulate it beyond this point yet. I’ll certainly keep trying though, because that’s what I believe in, the ceaseless quest, and hopefully this entire website and all my work is a testament to the effects of that belief in my life.

• Placebo Effect & Alternative Medicine
• Nighttime is the right time
• Freedom on a Leash
• Placebos and Consciousness Restructuring
• Occult Investigator’s Greatest Hits