“The signature of authoritarianism is not the use of force, but the pathological dependence on deception, often to the extent of becoming self-delusional.”
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
Samizdata quote of the dayApril 8th, 2020 |
 23 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
And today, the UK government has announced that manufacturing can continue pretty much as normal.
Self-delusional yet?
I’m giving it three weeks before our societies – US and UK – quietly slide back into full-time employment and we start targeting our quarantines – as we should have done from the start.
Right now it’s still a frightening war, and so people are willing to hide. Once many people miss three or four paychecks, sentiment is going to change.
bobby,
I hope to everything you are right. I hope but don’t expect – much depends on the testing availability. Certainly not in the UK where things have descended into a cult based on the Battle of Britain and the NHS. They’ve even wheeled out Dame Vera… I think some people are actively enjoying this demented playing at how Great Britain is whilst everything goes to wrack and ruin… But, hey, we’ll get Kate riding up and down at Tilbury docks in full Alexander McQueen.
I dunno: The force also sucks. I don’t have to buy their bullshit worldview, but I do have to obey the lunatics with the guns.
I don’t think I understand the quote. If you’re self-delusional, you presumably believe that what you’re saying is actually true. If you tell other people what you believe to be the truth, is that being deceptive, or simply wrong? Does this not include anyone with wrong beliefs, who sincerely expresses those beliefs to others? And what then are you supposed to do about it? How can you decide what to tell other people, if you genuinely cannot tell which of your own beliefs are wrong?
It appears a very odd standard to set. It seems the only people who can avoid being deceptive, and hence authoritarian, and still speak are people who infallibly know the truth, and know they do with absolute certainty. And it seems to me that people who are certain they have infallible knowledge of the truth are the very people most likely to be authoritarian.
I would have thought that the distinguishing characteristic of authoritarians was more like a mistaken honesty. They honestly believe they know how best to run the world, and how other people should live their lives, and they tell others what they must and must not do for their own good and for the good of society. So powerful is their certainty in their own rightness, that when the observable facts contradict their beliefs, they conclude that it is the ‘facts’ that must be mistaken. They are being deceived by these purveyors of ‘facts’! They thus end up asserting falsehoods, but this is not a matter of deliberate deception. They believe that what they do is good and right, for which they deserve credit and reward, and they seek the power only to do good. And when the world doesn’t respond as they expect, when disaster ensues, that can only be because evil has sabotaged their efforts. But it’s not a lie; it’s a mistake.
Perhaps later, when they realise they were mistaken after all, then they might start telling lies. Then it’s about their personal survival. But by then most of the damage is already done.
The dangerous delusion is that any of us knows what is best for others, with such powerful certainty that we honestly feel safe in imposing it on other people by force. The danger is so acute because the deluded is by definition unaware of it. You can’t avoid it by being honest, or noble, or kind, or seeking the good of society. The only defence is self-doubt. The best of us lack all conviction.
NiV: “If you’re self-delusional, you presumably believe that what you’re saying is actually true.”
Not at all. You know you are wrong, but you choose to believe the error.
In Soviet East Germany, the price of truth was too high. Everyone knew the state line was a lie, but to speak out openly about it would drastically attenuate your life chances.
NiV: “I would have thought that the distinguishing characteristic of authoritarians was more like a mistaken honesty.”
Let’s apply that metric to some historical figures. ‘Stalin, was mistakenly honest’. Hmmm! ‘Hitler was just misunderstood’, Uh huh! No, doesn’t work for me.
NickM: “Certainly not in the UK where things have descended into a cult based on the Battle of Britain and the NHS.”
It’s hilarious … ly tragic. No one in the UK seems prepared to actually, stand up for a thing.
But in actual fact, I think it too late. I look around this society and I see institutions that are enemy territory. Utterly compromised and completely occupied. There is nothing to save except facsimiles of what we thought we had.
Take the Police. I’m reminded of one of the final episodes of Z-cars or some other ’70 police soap. It ended with the desk Sergeant pressing the button at the front desk that rolled the armored shutters down over the doors and windows.
If you have had the misfortune to encounter the British Police, you’ve already discovered what a bovine unthinking ‘box checking’ bunch of ‘tossers’ they are. No discretion no common sense.
“Self-delusional” differs from “delusional.” Otherwise, why have two terms?
@NIV I think your mistake is assuming that “Belief” is binary, you either believe something or your don’t. But that isn’t true at all. Belief is a gray thing, many beliefs are only very weakly held, and many times we deliberately suspend the reasoning chain between one place and the other because it costs more to believe one thing or another.
It is an assumption based on an incorrect view of how people arrive and beliefs an how they hold them. Beliefs are there to settle you in to a particular social set, and we are only really tight on what I might call generative beliefs — ones that actually impact decisions.
For example, no rational person would believe that the world was created in seven days six thousand years ago, but lots of people hold that belief, because by doing so it gains them access to a social culture and support system that is vastly more valuable that a correct understanding of geology or astrophysics.
This is writ large in our present situation. The news media hate Donald Trump, and I think primarily they hate him because his is, in their view, uncouth and unsophisticated perhaps more than anything else. So they believe he is doing a terrible job of handling covid. And they can hold that belief (regardless of the facts, whatever they may be) because they can justify it in a kind of self righteous “we are saving the country” viewpoint. The facts are more materials to justify the belief they already arrived at.
And that is precisely the kind of self delusion I think the OP is referring to. It isn’t so much that they believe Trump is doing a bad job, the truth is they haven’t really thought about it in any analytical way. They decided what their belief was based on advancing their agenda and satisfying their emotional needs, and then did a kind of backward justification, finding things that seem to support this belief. It is the difference between analysis and justification. And in truth, based on what I have seen of the world, this is pretty much the way we form nearly all our belief (yours truly included.) Not all, but nearly all.
And that is true irrespective of whether the President is doing a good job or a bad job.
“Not at all. You know you are wrong, but you choose to believe the error.”
Can you *choose* to believe something you know to be false?
(Actually, I’d argue yes, in a way. Humans can do ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, and temporarily work with a sub-model of the world that they know is wrong, but temporarily treat as true. For example, reading fiction. Or for a more scientific example, use classical Newtonian physics. However, I’d also argue that at the time you’re doing it, you also temporarily don’t ‘know’ you’re wrong. A physicist while calculating ‘knows’ that the force the Earth applies on the sun has to be equal and opposite to the force the sun applies on the Earth, even though they are 8 light minutes apart, and the sun ‘sees’ the earth in a different part of its orbit, as it was 8 minutes ago. It is, temporarily, ‘true’; and he is being totally honest when, operating in the Newtonian mindset, he says so. To the extent that it is a genuine delusion, it is thereby not a deception. If he flips back into a relativistic mindset, it is then deception but not delusion.)
“In Soviet East Germany, the price of truth was too high. Everyone knew the state line was a lie, but to speak out openly about it would drastically attenuate your life chances.”
I don’t think so. While everyone knew that much of it was untrue, they didn’t always know which bits. So some things were really believed, because the evidence showing them to be a lie was not available, and some things were not believed, but people hid their disbelief.
Just because they said it doesn’t mean they believed it.
“Let’s apply that metric to some historical figures. ‘Stalin, was mistakenly honest’. Hmmm! ‘Hitler was just misunderstood’, Uh huh! No, doesn’t work for me.”
Hitler genuinely believed he was saving Germany. Stalin I think was more cynical, knew them to be lies, and was in no way deluding himself about it. But the genuine Communists who fought the revolution honestly thought they were doing the right thing.
My point is that there is a contradiction between self-delusion and dishonesty. Either you are self-deluded, and then being honest with everyone else about your beliefs, or you are being deceptive, in which case you know very well it is false. It’s true that belief is non-binary and context-dependent, but you can’t switch contexts half way through a proposition and have the sentence still make logical sense. That’s just equivocation.
“No one in the UK seems prepared to actually, stand up for a thing.”
Of course they are. They are all stood up for saving lives, helping the NHS manage.
What I think you mean is that nobody in the UK seems willing to stand up for what *you* think they should want to stand up for. Obviously so. They don’t agree with you.
““Self-delusional” differs from “delusional.” Otherwise, why have two terms?”
Sure. “Flammable” differs from “inflammable”, or why have two terms?
“I think your mistake is assuming that “Belief” is binary, you either believe something or your don’t. But that isn’t true at all.”
I agree.
“Belief is a gray thing, many beliefs are only very weakly held, and many times we deliberately suspend the reasoning chain between one place and the other because it costs more to believe one thing or another.”
There are differing degrees of *confidence* in beliefs, and we sometimes suspend the chain of reasoning because it would contradict beliefs we have more confidence in than our confidence in our own reasoning.
“Beliefs are there to settle you in to a particular social set”
What you *say* your beliefs are can settle you in a social set, but what you *say* you believe is independent of what you *actually* believe.
“For example, no rational person would believe that the world was created in seven days six thousand years ago”
Why not? Most people have little or no knowledge of the evidence for or against this assertion, and very few would be able to refute the assertion scientifically against a knowledgeable opponent. Most people believe it or disbelieve it because that’s what they’ve been told. If people are told something different, they are perfectly capable of believing that too.
When people know things but no longer remember the reasons for them (usually because they were told a long time ago, during childhood), there is a tendency to consider them “obvious” or “self-evident”. And if something is “obvious” or “self-evident”, then everyone else must know the same thing. So when they come across people who claim not to believe it, the obvious conclusion is that they must be either lying or mad.
This is like the archetypal Englishman abroad who is firmly convinced that all foreigners can understand English if spoken slowly and loudly enough. The meaning of words is “obvious”, so every rational person must understand them. Foreigners only use different words for things to fit into their foreign social set. (It’s also why they’re not as smart as Englishmen, because they’re continually having to mentally translate English into that heathen gabble and back again, using up brain resources.)
“And they can hold that belief (regardless of the facts, whatever they may be) because they can justify it in a kind of self righteous “we are saving the country” viewpoint.”
Quite so. They believe. And as such, they are *honestly* trying to save the country.
Everybody fits the ‘facts’ into their own worldview. They do, and so do you. And they are just as convinced that *you* must be mad or lying not to see what they consider to be *obvious* as vice versa. They are just as honestly trying to save the country from *you* as you are honestly trying to save the country from *them*.
This is the paradox of ‘us’ and ‘them’ thinking. The situation is symmetrical, but appears totally asymmetrical to the participants on both sides.
“And that is precisely the kind of self delusion I think the OP is referring to. It isn’t so much that they believe Trump is doing a bad job, the truth is they haven’t really thought about it in any analytical way.”
Again, don’t assume that because they come to different conclusions to you that they haven’t thought about it. They’re just using a different analysis.
“And in truth, based on what I have seen of the world, this is pretty much the way we form nearly all our belief (yours truly included.)”
Agreed! Exactly! And then we tell other people about those beliefs, yes?
But then, if the quote at the top is true, that would imply we’re all authoritarians. And that’s contrary to our agenda, so… 🙂
Self-delusional. The thing is if you have a post-empirical mindset (there’s got to be another term – but let’s stick with that for now) then truth is a slippery thing and becomes something which is more invented than discovered. It occurs to me that the the likes of the Frankfurt School and other forms of Marxism or fellow travellers are engaged in engineering. They are “Making it so”. So, yes, they do genuinely believe six impossible things before breakfast. The fact that their belief is genuine doesn’t make it good or even well-meaning.
It can be seen as philosophical idealism run amok in the real world. It is essentially Borges’ Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. And it is vastly more terrifying than any mere brutish police state because it doesn’t enforce with violence but sets out to change the very nature of reality via things like changing the meaning of words and denying the existence of material objects in and of themselves.
Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is for me more profoundly disturbing a story than even 1984. It, along with the rest of Borges is highly recommended.
NiV: “They are all stood up for saving lives, helping the NHS manage.”
Sentimental drivel. The NHS should be dismantled and something much better put in its place.
APL: “Everyone knew the state line was a lie, but to speak out openly about it would drastically attenuate your life chances.”
NiV: “While everyone knew that much of it was untrue, they didn’t always know which bits.”
In practical terms, what is the difference?
If you don’t know what aspects of what you are being told is true. Eventually you must decide it’s all a lie. Another aspect of totalitarianism; What may be correct this week, might be officially untrue next week. An ordinary Joe has no metric to understand where in the matrix he stands. Which of course is exactly the way the totalitarian state wants it.
Nullius in Verba (April 8, 2020 at 11:15 pm et seq), you are having a hard time understanding the quote because you are not understanding it in the correct temporal order.
I can imagine a perfectly sensible but very different quote, making a valid point, to the effect that successful self-delusion can sometimes enhance one’s ability to deceive others – people believe you because they sense you really do believe yourself. But the quote is in the reverse order: it is about the pathological dependence on deception, often to the extent of becoming self-delusional”. It’s about how one can start by selling snake-oil in a thoroughly conscious manner and end-up in a hospital bed begging the nurses to bring you some so it will cure you, with an intermediate stage in which the fact that it is snake-oil can be banished from the mind for long periods. When your authoritarian-ruled customers dare not question the medicine’s efficacy, this banishment can last longer than is safe and/or be omitted when some indirect hint would at an earlier time have reminded you to recall it. The difficulty of preventing propaganda from deceiving the propagandists as much as or more than their targets is something I’ve posted and commented on several times.
As far as Authoritarians depending on deception goes, Hannah Arendt wrote that “the one rule of which everyone in a totalitarian state can be sure” is that “true power begins where secrecy begins”. The point is picked up on by Joachim Fest (“The Face of the Third Reich”) who uses the career of Martin Bormann (little known to the public) to illustrate it. While I’d debate some things Hannah says, and many Joachim says, I feel both have a point here. If you replace Authoritarian with the more extreme Totalitarian then deception and concealment have a role far beyond mere propaganda.
Whether one can assert that any authoritarian regime must, regardless of any other issue, rely crucially on deceit is more debatable. Whether Frederick the Great’s remark
was true when he said it and/or could have long survived the people taking him seriously is debatable, but it is not clear to me whether mere force can make an authoritarian state that uses no more deceit than others or not.
https://twitter.com/AmityShlaes/status/1247667649271812096
“The thing is if you have a post-empirical mindset (there’s got to be another term – but let’s stick with that for now) then truth is a slippery thing and becomes something which is more invented than discovered.”
There is something to that. It was a big change in mathematics around the turn of the 20th century, when people realised that you could start with different sets of axioms and get different versions of ‘truth’. In physics too, with the dual revolutions of relativity and quantum mechanics, we realised more clearly that everything is models and approximations. You pick the right model for the problem. For some, Newtonian physics is sufficient. For others, you have to go up to relativity or quantum mechanics. For some problems you can assume rigid bodies and perfect fluids. For other problems the untruths are too much. And yes, we engineer useful worldviews rather than discover absolute truths.
“It occurs to me that the the likes of the Frankfurt School and other forms of Marxism or fellow travellers are engaged in engineering.”
*All* political ideologies are engaged in social engineering. We, for example, want to engineer a libertarian society, and worldview. That’s what politics is.
“The fact that their belief is genuine doesn’t make it good or even well-meaning.”
Agreed.
“Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is for me more profoundly disturbing a story than even 1984. It, along with the rest of Borges is highly recommended.”
Agreed. I quite liked it. Although as usual with Borges, what he’s talking about is a lot more complicated than it appears on the surface. As is common with science fiction and fantasy, writers are very often using the genre of describing strange and bizarre alternative worlds really to talk about *this* world, and how it might appear to someone not born into our mindset. The thing is, even though Orbis Tertius is a constructed, invented reality, so is the standard view of the world. It asks what would our world be like if Berkeley’s Idealism had become the dominant philosophy. There’s quite a lot of Schrodinger’s Cat in the story, too. The act of observation influences reality, it is what it is partly because of how we choose to look at it. And quantum mechanics seems to us so crazy not because there is anything illogical or untrue about it, but because it conflicts with our fundamental philosophical beliefs and assumptions about an ‘objective’ reality independent of the observer, in the same sort of way that the philosophy of Tlon differs from ours. If a tree falls in a forest, if a cat lives or dies in a box, and nobody is there to observe it, does it make a sound? So given that quantum mechanics tells us that our philosophy of reality is wrong, is it not our standard view of the world that is the constructed, invented reality?
Then one could see the writers of the encyclopedia, undermining reality, as like the discoverers of quantum mechanics, undermining our worldview in just as fundamental a way. Except that in this inverted picture, they’re telling the truth, and we’re constructing the fiction! In Borges time they had only written the first chapter of QM, and it had barely started to penetrate the popular culture. But he could see it coming, and that it would eventually overturn everything they thought of then as sane and sensible.
Likewise, The Garden of Forking Paths clearly recounts the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. The author wrote his labyrinth, but his meaning was not understood by most of those who followed, just as was the case for Hugh Everett. The Lottery in Babylon talks about chance, and the fortunes of life, as the picture of an artificial lottery merges gradually into the lottery that is life and reality itself. The Circular Ruins is about authors inventing characters, and worlds for them to live in, but who are themselves inventions living in an invented world. And so on.
The stories are about parallel realities, parallel wordviews, and invented models of the world embedded inside other models and worlds. It’s a fascinating book. But its significance is that the fictions in it are not entirely fictional, and we really do live in such a world.
“Sentimental drivel. The NHS should be dismantled and something much better put in its place.”
Maybe so. But it’s what they believe, and what stand for.
“In practical terms, what is the difference? If you don’t know what aspects of what you are being told is true. Eventually you must decide it’s all a lie.”
No, generally people continue to believe the bits they believe, and not believe the bits they don’t.
You know yourself that you are fallible, and science and knowledge are continually progressing, so it is almost certainly the case that some of your beliefs are not true. You just don’t know which ones. Does that make you feel any less confident of your assertions?
“But the quote is in the reverse order: it is about the pathological dependence on deception, often to the extent of becoming self-delusional”. It’s about how one can start by selling snake-oil in a thoroughly conscious manner and end-up in a hospital bed begging the nurses to bring you some so it will cure you”
Yes, I can see how that interpretation works. When it becomes delusional, it ceases to be deceptive. Thanks!
Kant said something like that a bit later, with different pronouns in the second clause.
I believe that Voltaire came up with the idea, though. I think it might work, with a monarch modest enough to listen to the people, and intelligent enough to find ways to address their complaints. Not ideal, but it might work. The problem comes when the monarch dies, or becomes senile.
With only a cursory glance at the debate between Nullius and his critics, i picked up a couple of quibbles.
That is not what seems to have happened to Hitler, though. As shown in the famous scene in Downfall, he seems to have become increasingly delusional to his last days.
Or take TDS. It seems to me that Trump’s critics start by semi-consciously lying.
Only later, when they are ridiculed, they start to believe their own propaganda, as a defense mechanism.
I guess it depends on your definition of ideology, but my political philosophy has nothing to do with social engineering. It has to do with predicting what the government might do (e.g. a lockdown) and plan accordingly. Being able to vote wisely is only a by-product.
I don’t think that i am the only one.
“I guess it depends on your definition of ideology”
Perhaps I should have said political activism.
I very much doubt the proposition of the quote that pathological reliance on deception is the signature of authoritarianism. Pathological lying to the point of self-deception is a characteristic of all openly left-wing parties in Britain, which is a democracy of sorts. It is unsurprisingly a characteristic of our public sector, which has, of course, been created in the image of the Labour party. In Scotland, it is a characteristic of the SNP, which has become more labour than the Labour party.
NiV: “You know yourself that you are fallible, and science and knowledge are continually progressing, so it is almost certainly the case that some of your beliefs are not true. You just don’t know which ones. Does that make you feel any less confident of your assertions?”
And that doesn’t matter in a free society, you are free to review your biases and prejudices at any time and modify them as appropriate. But not true in an authoritarian/totalitarian state, or at least it’s not a self analytical process, as it’s driven by the State and usually bears little relationship to ‘lived experience’ (to steel an SJW catch phrases), as it motivated by the state ideology.
NiV,
Interesting point about classical/relativistic mechanics. One I have pondered (having worked with both) in the celestial field. Having said that I largely agree with your characterisation of working using Newtonian solar system mechanics as a form of self-deception I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. Basically any interesting problem in the field will be multi-body so… you are working in terms of approximations anyway such as the circular restricted three body problem* which has to be crunched through with one hell of a computer (which of course distances you, in a kinda tactile, intuitive sense, from the actual physics). This is a major issue I have in general with computer modelling of highly problematic systems – they produce results but not understanding. Anyway, as far as the solar system is concerned (for sure GR is needed for some astrophysical phenomena) the most noticeable relativistic phenomena is the advance of the perihelion of Mercury which is 43 arc seconds per century – or in “new money” about 6.6*10^-14 radians/s**.
Your comparison to suspension of disbelief with respect to literature is probably a better one. Not least because our species seems from way back to have a natural tendency to explain things in terms of stories.
-Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius – Jorge Luis Borges.
-The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul – Douglas Adams.
*Which I found perturbing – quite literally.
**I personally find such buggering about with units and such quite amusing but Douglas Adams was bang on that nobody ever gained any greater understanding by, “considering a satsuma in Reading and a walnut in Johannesburg”.
To put NiV’s take on Borges – which I essentially agree with* – in even more modern terms – we live in a virtual reality. Evolution didn’t gives us the brains we have to examine the eternal verities but to figure out smart ways to survive. Different people do see the World in remarkably different ways. I am not arguing here at all that moral relativism is a good thing but it is a thing because we perceive things differently either due to ingrained beliefs or even more easily scientifically explicable things.
I know the later because I’m RG colour blind. One day my wife was going to the shops and asked if there was anything else we needed. I said, “We’re out of toothpaste – you know that green stuff”. She looked blank. Turns out it was Corsodyl (I’d forgotten the name) and that is salmon-pink. It looks pink to me now. It didn’t before but it changed colour for me instantaneously when I was told what colour it really is. Suffice to say I find computer graphics a boon because you can specify the colour in hex.
A more extreme example are the rare cases where people who have been born blind, or have been blind for a long time, (re)gain sight. They tend not to be able to perceive anything more than a metre or so above their eye-level for quite some time after their sight has become physiologically normal. That’s not an arbitrary distance – it’s the length of a white stick. That is what I mean by “virtual reality” – the blind person’s brain hasn’t needed to process the visual (or quasi-visual) stimuli that a sighted person has to.
*I think I’d disagree with him on QM but that is another thing and anyway I’ve got a BBQ to have. Just me and my wife – so no dobbing me in to the rozzers.
“And that doesn’t matter in a free society, you are free to review your biases and prejudices at any time and modify them as appropriate. But not true in an authoritarian/totalitarian state, or at least it’s not a self analytical process, as it’s driven by the State and usually bears little relationship to ‘lived experience’ (to steel an SJW catch phrases), as it motivated by the state ideology.”
Yes, the problem is that authoritarians don’t do it consistently. They use uncertainty to attack and dissolve their opponents’ beliefs, but they refuse to apply the same methods to themselves and their own beliefs. They are firmly convinced that they are right, that all the issues of fallibility don’t apply to them, and they force their one worldview, their norms, their beliefs about what is right and good for society, and its members, on everybody else. They are subject to the paradox of the symmetric appearance of asymmetry – they believe the situation is asymmetric, that they are right and their opponents wrong, and all the philosophy of uncertainty and fallibility is applied one-way.
“Anyway, as far as the solar system is concerned (for sure GR is needed for some astrophysical phenomena) the most noticeable relativistic phenomena is the advance of the perihelion of Mercury which is 43 arc seconds per century – or in “new money” about 6.6*10^-14 radians/s**.”
Well, it depends which bits of relativity you choose to incorporate. Perhaps the most noticeable relativistic phenomenon is that the solar system still exists!
Remember what I said about the forces being equal and opposite between Earth and sun? Well, suppose we consider the possibility that gravity only travels at the speed of light. Then the Earth will be pulled towards where the sun is now (as it is not moving much), but the sun will be pulled towards where the Earth was 8 minutes ago, which is about 1/65,700 of an orbit. This means the forces are pointing in slightly different directions, and there is a continuous couple being applied to the system. It destabilises the orbits on timescales of the order of 65,000 years.
Laplace concluded from this in 1805 that gravity must propagate at around 7 million times the speed of light!
So if you accept the principle from special relativity that nothing goes faster than light, then you need corrections from general relativity to avoid the solar system flying apart.
The issue of instantaneous-action-at-a-distance rather than finite-speed propagation through a medium was one that Newton himself had recognised. He wrote to Bentley to say: “Tis unconceivable that inanimate brute matter should (without the mediation of something else which is not material) operate upon & affect other matter without mutual contact; as it must if gravitation in the sense of Epicurus be essential & inherent in it. And this is one reason why I desired you would not ascribe {innate} gravity to me. That gravity should be innate inherent & {essential} to matter so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of any thing else by & through which their action or force {may} be conveyed from one to another is to me so great an absurdity that I beleive no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.”
Newton himself considered action-at-a-distance to be so absurd an idea that nobody could possibly believe it! He objected to having his name associated with such a law of gravity. He was forced into it, because as he knew well the theory simply didn’t work otherwise. Propagation had to be near-instantaneous over vast distances, or the third law of motion would be violated. But I’ve seen hundreds of physics students peacefully take Newton’s law of gravity and its implications for granted.
We believe what we’re told to believe. And people in different times and different cultures get told different things, and so believe different things. Their beliefs are usually as honestly held as ours are.