The Mandalorian And Pretending To Believe

Mild spoilers for season 1 of the 2019 TV show "The Mandalorian", but no big plot twists are spoiled. And if you still haven't watched it, maybe you are only pretending to believe you're going to watch it? In which case, you should read this anyway.

The Mandalorian reminds me of what David Chapman and I talked about in a recent bonus episode of my podcast, an interview about "Pretending To Believe".

There's an old joke that goes, "Protestants don't recognize the Pope, Calvinists don't recognize the Sinner's Prayer, and Baptists don't recognize other Baptists in a liquor store."

When the main character, Din Djarin, says he never removes his helmet in front of another living thing, he is completely sincere. He also believes the fellow extremists in his covert of Mandalorians never remove their helmets. But they don't know each other's faces. So how would he know if they took off the armor and walked around Navarro right in front of him? The whole point of that tradition is that they don't know each other's faces. That's the active ingredient, don't you see? I think most of them probably blow off some steam from time to time so they don't go out of their minds. It's what makes the whole thing work.

 

When they intone THIS IS THE WAY, and project so much confidence to each other, they cooperate in a tacit deal. "I'll pretend in front of you that I never take off my helmet, to bolster your resolve. In return, you'll pretend in front of me, to bolster mine. If we pretend HARD ENOUGH that THIS IS THE WAY, we'll be bolstered despite the fact that we both know it's probably pretend." And it works. They need each other for this. Such is the group dynamics of extremism.
 

This is sometimes called "preference falsification." Your preference is to take off your helmet, but you falsify that to say you don't want to take off your helmet ever, because everybody's doing it. Unfortunately, when one has been bolstered in the firm resolve of falsifying one's own preferences, one starts accusing everyone outside of one's own faction of being the real extremists. For example, it has become common on the internet to put on a big show of performative cruelty toward the oppressed. They mis-use the phrase "virtue signaling" to describe others who fail to abandon all compassion. That's a waste; they ruined the phrase "virtue signaling". As anthropological concepts in their original context, virtue signaling and preference falsification are some of the most important insights of the past few decades. It's tough to make sense of culture without them.

The old-timer Mandalorians, like the Forgemaster, know perfectly well they take their own helmets off around somebody somewhere, and they are pretty sure the others probably do, too. They are 100-percent sincere in the sense of 100 percent committed, but also zero-percent sincere in that they know it's not true. Din Djarin is 100-percent sincere in both ways, more's the pity. Woe unto Din Djarin, for only when one is that literalistic can one become disillusioned. The Forgemaster understands this; you can hear her voice dripping with it when Din turned down a sigil because he sincerely thought he was supposed to earn it, and she said "ooooohhh kaaaaay..." This kid is making it hard to play along. Rude. The Forgemaster is first-generation, so she's in on the wink-and-nod. It's only the second-generation like Din who are not in on it. Those are the true believers. They will eventually go down the path of disillusionment which Luke Skywalker displayed in The Last Jedi.

After the covert was raided, there was pile of helmets, but no bodies. From that, I concluded that when the Empire caught wind of the covert, half of the Mandalorians put their helmet on the pile when no one was looking, and snuck out the back door. No one knows what they look like, so none of their fellow Mandalorians were any the wiser, even if they boarded the same spacecraft off of Navarro the next day.
 

Baptists don't recognize other Baptists in a liquor store.
 

"They can never put the helmet on again." Of course they do. What's to stop them? The only way an extreme movement like that could persist is to design its beliefs in such a way that, if it's not true, no one can tell. I am totally sold on the plausibility of this creed; it checks out with my understanding of group dynamics.
 

I've been reading "Ritual And Its Consequences: An Essay On The Limits Of Sincerity", a work of ethnomethodology and anthropology, which has a lot more to say about different modes of "belief" that can be said to be held "sincerely". I am used to assuming complete and total sincerity from myself and others, inward and outward being the same. That just got me confused for my entire life. According to the authors, not only does this assumption not hold up under scrutiny, it's far from common. According to this essay, pure authenticity is a very specifically weird trait of the culture I've been raised in. And also, they say the contradictions are potentially debilitating. Sometimes you just do things to do things; these helmets and prayers and other rituals are like music or dance. They are not "belief". We only mistake them for belief. You just do it. There is a mode of sincerity, common to the rest of the human race, in which one can try on different selves like putting on a helmet. There is no one true self which is consistent at all times. 
 

They did not title their book "Ritual And Its Benefits", so there's definitely a light side and a dark side to it. This is ... A way.