Yesterday (June 28) the Supreme Court voted to support the University of California Hastings College of the Law when it determined that if you accept public money and utilize public facilities you cannot discriminate against gays because that is against current laws prohibiting discrimination.

In 2004 the Christian Legal Society established a chapter at the U.C. law school that required members to swear “unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle,” which it defined as sex outside heterosexual marriage. So, presumably, every member is either married or a virgin, and is most definitely straight.

Two thoughts to clear this up:

(1). If you want to discriminate against people whose beliefs, ideas, or nature you don’t like, you are free to do so with your own money. You cannot take Other People’s Money (OPM) and expect no strings to be attached, especially when it is public money. So, by all means, the Christian Legal Society should have the right to exclude anyone they like from their club, including gays, Jews, blacks, atheists, Muslims, and Elvis impersonators, as long as they rent their own facility and pay for it with their own private money. It’s that simple.

(2). It isn’t that simple, because just last month in the run-up to the primary elections, the Republican Senate candidate from Kentucky, Rand Paul, found himself in a heap of hot water when he argued that the civil rights movement did not really need the support of the Federal government, that private businesses should be allowed to discriminate against whomever they like, as abhorrent as such discrimination is. Here is what he said on the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC when the host asked him, “Do you think that a private business has the right to say ‘we don’t serve black people’?”:

“I’m not in favor of any discrimination of any form. I would never belong to any club that excluded anybody for race. We still do have private clubs in America that can discriminate based on race. But I think what’s important about this debate is not written into any specific ‘gotcha’ on this, but asking the question: What about freedom of speech? Should we limit speech from people we find abhorrent? Should we limit racists from speaking? . . . I don’t want to be associated with those people, but I also don’t want to limit their speech in any way in the sense that we tolerate boorish and uncivilized behavior because that’s one of the things freedom requires.”

Paul then backpedaled faster than Lance Armstrong front-pedals:

“Let me be clear: I support the Civil Rights Act because I overwhelmingly agree with the intent of the legislation, which was to stop discrimination in the public sphere and halt the abhorrent practice of segregation and Jim Crow laws.”

Question: why is it acceptable for a private Christian group to discriminate against gays as long as they do not use public money or publicly-owned facilities, but it is unacceptable—blatantly illegal in fact—for a private restaurant to discriminate against blacks? Can we have some consistency here?

The recent flap over the inopportune comments by General Stanley McChrystal and his staff in the presence of and even directly to a Rolling Stone magazine journalist, and the ensuing hue and cry “off with their heads” for what amounts to something akin to alcohol-fueled barroom B.S.ing and locker-room boys-will-be-boys jock talk, affords an opportunity to distinguish between public talk and private talk.

Private talk is what we say in private to our spouses, family, friends, and colleagues when there is a presumption of privacy such that one’s comments will not go public. Public talk is what we say when we want to make a formal statement or declaration with the intention of and responsibility for what was said. Too often we confuse these two very different forms of expression. Everyone is treating the private talk of McChrystal and his staff as if it were intended for public consumption. It is almost as if McChrystal had held a press conference and issued a formal public statement that Joe Biden’s new name is “bite me.” Surely we should recognize the vast gulf that exists between these two types of talk, and no one would want to insist that all private talk be held as if there were a microphone in the room that was on and broadcasting. Locker rooms and barrooms would go deadly silent.

Something similar happened to California Senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina the day of the primary election, when she was caught mocking the hair of her rival Sen. Barbara Boxer when she thought that her microphone was off, continuing with her private talk about Fox’s Sean Hannity and the cheeseburgers she wished she had eaten the night before.

And let’s not forget last year’s “climategate” flap in which the public discovered that scientists—shock of all shocks—are people who in private talk like everyone else, making fun of colleagues they don’t like, dissing rivals and competitors, and speaking colloquially as if they were not scientists investigating one of the most politically charged scientific issues of the past century—anthropogenic global warming.

On the other hand, if you are a General in charge of executing a war, a Senatorial candidate with aspirations of being one of the handful of people who can actually influence public policy, or a scientist who data and theory could alter entire economies for decades or even centuries, your private talk is not the same as that of everyone else’s. McChrystal knew he was talking to a Rolling Stone reporter, so as the head of hundreds of thousands of combat troops under the ultimate direction of the Commander-in-Chief at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., he should have been able to filter out his private talk. Ditto Carly Fiorina who, if she wins the Senate seat of a state whose economy rivals that of most countries, is bound to sit before microphones on almost a daily basis, so if she cannot discriminate between public and private talk now, had damn well better learn the difference. Likewise scientists whose opinions on climate change are used by politicians and policy makers worldwide to shape the direction of economic reform, have an obligation to presume that much of their private talk will be used publicly against them (and their recommendations) by those who disagree.

In other words, if you are in a position of power and influence, assume that the microphone is on.

Last week I blogged here about lying: “Everyone Lies: Why?”

Deception is one thing, self deception is quite another. This week TED.com has posted my new TED talk, entitled “The Pattern Behind Self Deception,” delivered at the last TED conference, in which I present material from my forthcoming book on the neuroscience of belief, tentatively entitled The Believing Brain, a central theme of which is how we are so easily deceived and how we deceive ourselves. Here is a brief summary of the thesis of the talk, although because it is so visual I strongly recommend watching the TED video.

Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspiracists, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Why?

The answer has two parts, starting with the concept of “patternicity,” which I define as the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. The face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a grilled-cheese sandwich, Satanic messages in rock music. Of course, some patterns are real: finding predictive patterns in changing weather, fruiting trees, migrating prey animals and hungry predators was central to the survival of Paleolithic hominids.

The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a Type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a Type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a Type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a Type II error). Since the cost of making a Type I error is less than the cost of making a Type II error, and since there’s no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.

But we do something other animals do not do. As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a “theory of mind”—the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others—we practice what I call agenticity: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. That is, we often infuse the patterns we find with agency, and believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down (as opposed to bottom-up causal randomness). Together, patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.

Agenticity carries us far beyond the spirit world. The Intelligent Designer is said to be an invisible agent who created life from the top down. Aliens are often portrayed as powerful beings coming down from on high to warn us of our impending self-destruction. Conspiracy theories predictably include hidden agents at work behind the scenes, puppet-masters pulling political and economic strings as we dance to the tune of the Bildebergers, the Rothchilds, the Rockefellers or the Illuminati.

There is now substantial evidence from cognitive neuroscience that humans readily find patterns and impart agency to them, well documented in the University of Bristol psychologist Bruce Hood’s new book SuperSense (HarperOne, 2009). Examples: Children believe that the sun can think and follows them around and they often add smiley faces on sketched suns. Adults typically refuse to wear a mass murderer’s sweater, believing that “evil” is a supernatural force that imparts its negative agency to the wearer (and, alternatively, that donning Mr. Rogers’ cardigan will make you a better person). A third of transplant patients believe that the donor’s personality is transplanted with the organ. Genital-shaped foods (bananas, oysters) are often believed to enhance sexual potency. Subjects watching geometric shapes with eyespots interacting on a computer screen infer that they represent agents with moral intentions.

“Many highly educated and intelligent individuals experience a powerful sense that there are patterns, forces, energies, and entities operating in the world,” Hood explains. “More importantly, such experiences are not substantiated by a body of reliable evidence, which is why they are supernatural and unscientific. The inclination or sense that they may be real is our suspersense.”

We are natural-born supernaturalists.

Between Floyd Landis’s recent confession that he lied for years about doping in cycling, to the accusations against Rod Blagojevich for lying about how he handled the replacement of Barack Obama’s Senate seat, to the endless parade of lies told by celebrities, religious leaders, corporate CEOs, and especially politicians, it might seem reasonable to ask: does everyone lie?

According to one of the most popular lines on one of television’s most popular series, House, the answer is “Everybody lies.” Dr. Gregory House, the show’s curmudgeonly brilliant diagnostician played by Hugh Laurie, assumes that most of his patients most of the time will lie to him and everyone else about how they got whatever peculiar disease or infliction that mystifies House and his team until they solve it 51 minutes into the hour. Let’s call this House’s Axiom: Everybody Lies.

Corollaries to House’s Axiom include:

“I don’t ask why patients lie, I just assume they all do.”

“It’s a basic truth of the human condition that everybody lies. The only variable is about what.”

“Truth begins in lies.”

“The most successful marriages are based on lies.”

“I’ve found that when you want to know the truth about someone that someone is probably the last person you should ask.”

“You want to know how two chemicals interact, do you ask them? No, they’re going to lie through their lying little chemical teeth. Throw them in a beaker and apply heat.”

Why does everybody lie? There are countless proximate (immediate) reasons:

Politeness: “Oh, I like your haircut”.

Empathy: you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings.

Embellishment: résumé, job application, college entrance essay, Facebook profile.

Embarrassment avoidance: “I don’t know how that dent in my car happened.”

Conflict avoidance: a little white lie now will avoid a larger conflict produced by the truth, as in “I was late because of traffic” instead of “I was late because I left late because what I was doing was more important than you.

Agreement to lie: as in the Omerta Rule of silence (discussed in prior post) where we all agree to lie if caught violating the rules.

And many others…

The deeper ultimate cause of lying has to do with our evolutionary past and the fact that we are a hierarchical social primate species that practices sexual (instead of asexual) reproduction, and seeks status in the hierarchy (we’re not truly egalitarian). If we reproduced with ourselves then there would be 100% certainty that our offspring was ours and there would be no need to deceive or worry about being deceived. Since the process of evolution is driven forward by the variation (and subsequent natural selection) produced by the genetic mixing up of genomes through sex, sexual reproduction is the predominant means of getting one’s genes into the next generation, and as such there is a less than 100% certainty that one’s genes are being forwarded through one’s partner, and this leads to an inevitable amount of deception between the sexes in any romantic relationship, either trying to get away with extra-partner relationships (lying about trysts), or trying to prevent the same (mate guarding). Trust may be broken once, maybe twice, but after that, very few relationships can survive.

Status is the other force behind deception, as hierarchical status infers all sorts of reproductive and survival advantages that lead us to embellish, exaggerate, and otherwise flat out lie about who we are, what we are capable of doing, what we have accomplished, and the like. The tension is always between establishing status as a truth-telling honorable person of integrity and a competent skilled intelligent able-bodied person deserving of recognition and reward. Ideally you can be and have both, but that is not always (or even usually) the case, and thus it is that we embellish, exaggerate, etc.

In football, defenders are not allowed to “hold” offensive players by grabbing their jersey or arm or leg, and if caught they are called for “holding” and their team is assessed a yardage penalty. That’s not cheating so much as it is gaming the system. If the ref doesn’t see you do it, then you got away with it, and you know that your opponent is going to try to do something similar to you to gain a slight advantage. The league’s job is to train officials to see as many of these infractions as they can in order to keep the integrity of the game high, otherwise there would be no point in having rules. Rules in sports must be clearly defined and strictly enforced or else there’s no point in having rules at all, and without rules there can be no games.

Which brings me to Arizona and their immigration dilemma. Actually, there’s a dilemma here for any liberty-loving person. In order to be free we need a society based on the rule of law, in which the laws are clearly defined and strictly enforced. Otherwise there would be no point in setting up and striving for a civil society. And yet the rule of law can go too far, restricting more freedoms than are granted by the original intent of the law.

So the first dilemma is this: I want the immigration laws enforced (or else eliminate the unenforceable immigration laws) but I don’t want to grant even more power to government authorities to restrict the freedoms of citizens than they already have. If the United States federal government, along with individual state governments, have laws about immigration, they must be clearly defined and strictly enforced, or else there’s no reason to have them at all and we should just open up the boarders and let everyone in who wants to come and let the market determine how many come, as long as the only reason they are coming is for the work.

Unfortunately it isn’t. Immigrants also come here for the social benefits. Free public education for their children is one obvious example. The problem is that nothing is free, so those schools have to be paid for out of taxes, and as we all know, a great many people use such services without paying the taxes for them, which means that someone else has to pay higher taxes than they normally word in order to provide this service, and naturally they resent the system being gamed by those unwilling or unable to pay for it.

So the second dilemma is this: either let no one in (unrealistic), or let everyone in and collect enough taxes from them to pay for the services used. The problem here is that the law is complicated and fuzzy with lots of loopholes that not only allow but even encourage people to game the system. And game it they do.

A temporary solution: grant authorities the power to enforce the immigration laws of the land until legislators can review, refine, re-define, and otherwise clarify precisely what immigration laws should be and how they can be reasonably enforced. Just as in sports, if Arizona’s law enforcement agencies are not empowered to enforce the laws, there’s no point in having the laws in the first place.