I told you at the beginning of the class that I started working on this material partly

because I was interested in why people were so inclined to go to any links to protect their

belief systems. I wanted to understand that I knew that those were systems of value, right?

That belief system is something that enables you to ascribe value to things so that you can act

in the world towards things and away from things, roughly speaking. And I've already made a case to

you that belief systems regulate people's emotions but not as a consequence of decreasing their death

anxiety or anything like that or even directly decreasing their their threat sensitivity or

uncertainty but more specifically by helping them orient themselves in the world so that what they

do matches what they want in the social environment. And it's an important set of distinctions because

the emotional control that belief systems allow is mediated by success in the social environment.

That's the crucial thing. It's not it's not directly it's not as if you're holding a belief system

and that's directly inhibiting somehow your emotional responsibility. It's more that you share

you have a motive orienting yourself in the world so that other people can understand what you're

up to so that you can cooperate and compete with them without conflict and the fact that you can

do that without conflict and maybe even with cooperation. That's what regulates your emotion.

So it's not only the fact of the belief belief system it's the fact that it's shared with everyone

else. And so people are willing to defend their belief systems because they're defending the territorial

structure that enables them to make sense of the world and then to act out making sense of the world

with everyone else around them. Now then the question arises. What if two different groups of

people have different belief systems? What do you do in a situation like that? And one answer is

you capitulate another answer is that you fight another answer might be that you come to some consensus

about how the difference between those different belief systems might be mediated so that you can

...