True belief, Jehovah's Witnesses

 

I've mentioned before that my last two years of Harvard, in "cultural anthropology" or ethnology, I did considerable detail with the local congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses, more sociological than anthropological, but all in the same vein. A thing that I saw and did not understand was that there was genuine belief in things to me absolutely off the wall. Of course questioning was not what I was about, so I held back remark, but I have never understood religious belief like that, even though it seems to be the majority human experience.

What you observed is actually one of the central puzzles of anthropology, psychology, and cognitive science. If anything, the unusual thing may not be that many people believe such things, but that some people don't.

One distinction that helped me understand this is that believers and nonbelievers are often not starting from the same mental experience. To someone who has never had a strong religious experience, a Witness's certainty about Armageddon, resurrection, or divine guidance can seem comparable to certainty about a fantasy novel. But many believers report experiences that feel to them as direct and self-evident as perception: a sense of presence, revelation, conviction, answered prayer, or spiritual certainty. An outsider may interpret that as emotion, coincidence, or cognitive bias; the believer experiences it as evidence.

Anthropologists eventually learned to be cautious about assuming that religious belief is primarily an intellectual conclusion. Often it is social, emotional, experiential, and identity-forming before it is doctrinal. A Jehovah's Witness may not first examine evidence and then conclude that only 144,000 go to heaven. More commonly, they become part of a community, develop trust in its authority, have experiences they interpret through that framework, and the doctrines become woven into a coherent worldview.

The Witnesses are especially interesting because many outsiders see their teachings as unusually specific and improbable. Yet from the inside, they have a very powerful explanatory structure. The world is chaotic and often unjust; Witness doctrine explains why. History is moving toward a known destination. Death is temporary. Suffering has a purpose. There is a community of people who agree on these answers. That is psychologically attractive even if one rejects the premises.

There is also something anthropologists sometimes call the "plausibility structure." We all believe many things because the people around us believe them. If everyone you trust agrees that Paris exists, you don't personally verify Paris. In a tight religious community, the same mechanism can apply to theological claims. The belief is constantly reinforced by family, friends, meetings, literature, and shared interpretation.

What I find particularly interesting in your description is that you say you "held back remark" and observed. Good ethnographers often report a moment of realizing that the believers were not pretending, not ignorant, and not merely repeating formulas. They genuinely perceived the world differently. Understanding that difference does not require accepting the beliefs, but it does require recognizing that the beliefs are embedded in an entire way of experiencing reality.

The reverse puzzle exists too. Many deeply religious people have trouble understanding how an atheist can genuinely not believe. To them, God's existence feels as obvious as gravity. They may conclude the atheist is angry, rebellious, or suppressing something because they literally cannot imagine the absence of that sense of certainty.

You mentioned before being raised Catholic and never really sharing the faith. Some people seem constitutionally less prone to religious conviction. Studies have found large differences among individuals in traits such as skepticism toward authority, need for cognitive closure, tendency toward mystical experience, and pattern-detection. None of these determines belief, but they can make religious faith feel either natural or foreign.

Your experience among the Witnesses sounds like the classic anthropological moment: not "How can they believe this?" but "What is it like to be a person for whom this is obviously true?" That's a harder question, and often a more revealing one.

I often heard comments to the effect that they feel extremely lucky to have found "the truth" and would not risk the consequences of learning alternative views.

That attitude is fascinating because it sounds irrational from the outside, yet it can be understood sociologically.

For many Witnesses, "the Truth" is not merely a set of propositions. It is a complete framework that explains the world, provides community, establishes morality, and promises salvation. Once someone accepts that framework, alternative viewpoints are not just competing ideas; they become existential threats.

Imagine someone who sincerely believes that a particular medicine is the only cure for a fatal disease. They might avoid books arguing the medicine is ineffective, not because they have refuted those books, but because they fear being persuaded and thereby losing the cure. The logic is circular, but it feels protective.

Anthropologists sometimes encounter what might be called "epistemic quarantine." A group teaches that outside information is dangerous precisely because it might undermine the group's beliefs. The prohibition itself becomes evidence of the importance of the beliefs. "If Satan wants to deceive us, of course he will use persuasive arguments." That makes contrary evidence easier to dismiss before it is even examined.

The irony is that many Witnesses regard themselves as unusually rational. They often emphasize Bible study, argument, and evidence. Yet there is a boundary beyond which inquiry becomes spiritually dangerous. Every belief system has some version of this, but high-commitment religious movements tend to make the boundary explicit.

What strikes me most in your observation is the phrase "lucky to have found the truth." That is not the language of someone who thinks they discovered a clever idea. It is the language of someone who thinks they escaped a catastrophe. If you truly believed that billions of people were headed for destruction while you had found the one correct path, then protecting that discovery would seem prudent rather than intellectually timid.

From an academic perspective, one of the most difficult things for outsiders to grasp is that many believers are not constantly weighing evidence for and against their faith. They settled the question long ago. To them, reading contrary material may feel less like investigating astronomy and more like investigating whether gravity exists. Why spend time entertaining something that is already known to be false?

Of course, from a scientific or scholarly viewpoint, that attitude is almost the opposite of how knowledge advances. Universities are built on the assumption that no idea should be shielded from examination. That's one reason the culture of academia and the culture of high-control religious groups often feel so alien to one another. They begin with very different assumptions about what should happen when a cherished belief encounters a challenge.

Bangkok streets

https://www.newsweek.com/what-uss-abraham-lincoln-arriving-thailand-means-economy-12394691 I'm curious what constitutes a "crackdown on prostitution" in Thailand.

Yes—and in the Thai context, “crackdown on prostitution” can sound considerably more dramatic than what is actually being done.

Thailand's 1996 Prevention and Suppression of Prostitution Act makes a number of activities illegal: public solicitation, advertising sexual services, operating or managing a prostitution establishment, procuring people, and coercing people into prostitution. Interestingly, the adult customer buying sex is generally not criminalized by that Act; the law is principally aimed at the people selling, arranging, or profiting from it.

So in Pattaya, a “crackdown” can amount to things such as:

Police walking the Beach Road and Walking Street areas, arresting or detaining people who openly solicit customers. In one February operation, undercover police reportedly posed as tourists, approached women on Pattaya Beach, and used the negotiation of a price and evidence such as condoms/lubricant as grounds for action. Twenty people were detained.

Raiding particular bars, massage establishments or other venues where police believe prostitution is being openly arranged, particularly if there are additional offenses such as trafficking, underage workers, drugs or immigration violations.

And making the visible street trade disappear temporarily is probably the biggest practical effect. That's rather different from eliminating Pattaya's enormous underlying sex industry. The recent reports say dozens of people have been detained ahead of the Lincoln's arrival, but there is no indication that Thailand suddenly intends to abolish Pattaya's sex industry.

There is an amusing—and very Thai—legal contradiction here. The activity is illegal, but the industry has operated openly for decades. Thailand's law is sufficiently broad that an aggressive application could shut down a substantial portion of Pattaya nightlife. Yet ordinary enforcement has generally been selective. Indeed, a bill submitted to Parliament this year proposes repealing the 1996 law and decriminalizing consensual adult sex work, precisely because the existing arrangement is considered outdated and leaves workers vulnerable.

So I would interpret the Newsweek wording as “police are temporarily making the prostitution that is normally tolerated less conspicuous,” rather than “Thailand is conducting a serious campaign to eradicate prostitution.”

And given that 5,000 extremely pent-up American sailors have just been deposited next door, the timing is hardly mysterious. 😄 Reuters explicitly reports that Pattaya authorities were concerned about increased sex tourism and had already conducted weekend raids in preparation for the visit.

In other words: “Please don't make us look like Pattaya while the Americans are here.”

Open and aggressive solicitation, not just by prostitutes but other characters (scams, drugs, etc.) in Bangkok was a positive nuisance, but relatively harmless unless one is worried about reputation.

Exactly. That distinction matters. Bangkok's problem historically hasn't been so much “people are secretly engaging in prostitution” as the conspicuous street ecosystem around it: touts, hustlers, drug sellers, scam artists, aggressive bar promoters, taxi/tuk-tuk schemes, and people trying to extract money from tourists.

For an ordinary visitor, most of it really is more irritating than dangerous. You learn the routine: say no, keep walking, don't get drawn into an argument, and don't accept unsolicited “special deals.” The reputation issue is almost a separate matter—someone can be doing something perfectly innocuous while being approached by somebody who assumes otherwise.

And that helps explain what a Thai “crackdown” can accomplish. Police don't necessarily have to eliminate the underlying activity. They can make the public face of it disappear for a while. Fewer people openly soliciting, fewer touts hanging around, more inspections of bars and massage shops, and suddenly the area looks respectable to visiting dignitaries and naval officers.

It's rather like sweeping the sidewalk before the mayor arrives. The dirt hasn't necessarily gone anywhere; it has simply become less visible.

I remember out on the street looking for a post office. Old woman approaches offering other thing, I say what I want, she smiles, takes my hand and leads me to post office, I give her small tip.

😂 That's actually a perfect illustration of the ambiguity of street solicitation.

She approached you with one transaction in mind, you explained you wanted something completely different, and she immediately switched roles from “saleswoman of questionable services” to “helpful local grandmother.” She knew where the post office was, took you there, and you paid her for the useful service she actually provided.

And frankly, that's a pretty good outcome. You got to the post office, she got a little money, and nobody needed to pretend that the original misunderstanding hadn't happened.

That sort of interaction is also why I think calling all of Bangkok's street solicitation dangerous rather misses the point. A lot of it was opportunistic rather than predatory. The nuisance was having to sort the legitimate/helpful people from the hustlers.

One that really irritated me was the baby elephant scam: an actual baby elephant, "we need money to feed it."

Oh yes—that one is particularly obnoxious because the elephant is real, which makes the pitch much more effective.

The usual setup was an elephant handler taking a young elephant around tourist areas, asking people to buy bananas or sugarcane—or simply contributing money “to feed the baby.” The tourist sees this enormous, undeniably hungry-looking animal standing right there, so the emotional appeal is immediate.

But the depressing part is that the elephant itself is often the victim of the scam rather than evidence that the money is needed for it. Young elephants being taken into urban tourist environments has long been criticized on animal-welfare grounds. They don't belong wandering Bangkok streets in the first place, and exposure to traffic, pollution, heat and unsuitable food is bad for them.

So it was a scam with an unusually effective prop: you couldn't simply say, “There is no elephant.” There bloody well was.

And I imagine that made it considerably more irritating than the ordinary tout who merely wanted to sell you something.

Replacing fossil fuels

The realistic alternative to fossil fuels appears to be nuclear after all. Not for everything, but solar and wind and thermal have their own issues.

Yes. I think that is increasingly the sensible way to frame it: there probably isn't one replacement for fossil fuels; there is a portfolio, and nuclear looks much more important in that portfolio than it did 20 years ago.

Solar and wind are excellent where their intermittency can be accommodated cheaply—especially for daytime electricity, favorable climates, and places with hydro or other dispatchable generation. But once you try to make them the entire backbone of a grid, you run into storage, transmission, land use, overbuilding, and long periods of low wind/solar production. Batteries are terrific for hours, considerably less compelling for weeks.

Nuclear has the opposite virtue: enormous energy density and continuous generation. It occupies relatively little land, produces essentially no operational CO₂, and doesn't care whether it is cloudy, calm, or nighttime. That makes it particularly attractive for the portion of electricity demand that needs to be there all the time.

Geothermal is rather nice too, but geography limits it. Hydroelectric is superb where you have the terrain and water, but we've already exploited many of the best sites. And fossil fuels remain useful for some applications—particularly aviation, shipping in some circumstances, and industrial processes—where replacing the fuel rather than merely the electricity is difficult.

The interesting question, then, isn't really "nuclear or renewables?" It's more like "how much of each can economically and reliably do the job?" And on that question, nuclear seems to have moved from being an awkward special case to being one of the major pieces of a plausible post-fossil energy system.

The big caveat is that nuclear's weakness isn't physics; it's construction economics, regulation, financing, and the extraordinary tendency of large nuclear projects to take far longer and cost far more than originally promised. If those problems can be brought under control, the argument for nuclear gets considerably stronger.

And there is the bird motality with wind.

Yes, although I’d put that one in perspective. Wind turbines do kill birds, and the mortality can be substantial in absolute numbers, particularly at large wind farms. But it isn't generally regarded as one of the largest human-caused sources of bird mortality; cats, collisions with buildings and vehicles, and habitat loss are typically much bigger contributors.

The important distinction is which birds. Wind turbines can be particularly problematic for raptors and other large soaring birds because they use the same air currents that make good turbine sites. That makes location crucial. A poorly sited wind farm can be considerably more damaging than the average turbine would suggest.

And this is another example of why "renewable" doesn't mean "impact-free." Solar has land and habitat effects, hydro radically alters rivers, geothermal has localized environmental consequences, and wind has wildlife and transmission issues.

Nuclear, rather amusingly, has a remarkably small direct wildlife footprint for the amount of electricity it produces. Its environmental controversies tend to be concentrated around waste, mining, accidents, and the construction process, rather than millions of square meters of energy infrastructure spread across the landscape.

Red-light district

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/02/uss-abraham-lincolns-crew-arrive-thailand-after-record-stint-at-sea There is no red-light district in Papaya. The article fails to mention Japanese and Koreans.

Yes. The Guardian's wording is a little too frozen in the Vietnam-era image of Pattaya.

It calls Pattaya a place "known for its red light district" and then describes its transformation during the Vietnam War, when American troops turned what had been a fishing village into one of the world's notorious red-light destinations.

But there isn't a discrete "red-light district" in Pattaya in the sense that phrase normally suggests. There are concentrations of nightlife and sex-oriented businesses—most famously Walking Street and some of the sois around it—but they are embedded in an enormous tourist city. You can be a few hundred metres from the nightlife and be in an ordinary shopping mall, condominium district, family hotel area, beach resort, or residential neighborhood.

And you're quite right about the Japanese and Koreans. The American military connection is historically important, but modern Pattaya's foreign population and tourism are much more diverse. Russians in particular have become highly visible, and Japanese, Koreans, Europeans, Indians and Chinese are all substantial components of the visitor/expatriate mix. AP's account at least acknowledges the later influx of Russians, but the Guardian's narrative is heavily centered on Americans and the Vietnam-era sex-tourism origin story.

There's an amusing irony here: the Guardian itself reports that Pattaya is actively trying to move away from precisely that image, while simultaneously putting "red light district" in the headline. The city mayor and police are apparently very keen to present this particular visit as ordinary tourism and economic activity rather than a reprise of 1960s–70s R&R.

And, given our conversation yesterday: 5,000 sailors who've been aboard ship for 286 days probably don't need the Guardian to tell them where Pattaya's nightlife is. 😄

Because Americans usually have much shorter vacations than Europeans, they tend to go to the Caribbean or similar rather than Asia.

Exactly. That is a pretty important distinction in understanding why Pattaya's American reputation can be misleading today.

For an American with perhaps one or two weeks of vacation, Southeast Asia is a considerable commitment: 20+ hours of flying each way, jet lag, and then you have to turn around and go home. The Caribbean, Mexico, Hawaii, Florida, or perhaps Europe makes much more sense for a short holiday.

Europeans, especially those with four to six weeks of annual leave, can afford to spend two or three weeks in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. And once they're making that long trip, staying for a substantial period makes the airfare worthwhile.

There is also a historical reversal going on. Pattaya was enormously important to the American military precisely because American servicemen were already in the region. R&R from Vietnam made a place that would otherwise have been an absurdly long journey from the United States suddenly very convenient. Once the infrastructure existed—hotels, restaurants, bars, transportation, entertainment—it could continue developing as an international tourist destination.

So the Guardian's mental picture is somewhat backwards: the American military helped create modern Pattaya, but Americans aren't necessarily the people sustaining modern Pattaya's tourism. The city has had decades to acquire an entirely different customer base.

And I'd add one other factor: for an American looking for an Asian holiday today, Thailand competes with an enormous number of closer Latin American and Caribbean destinations, whereas for Europeans Thailand is one of the great long-haul winter-sun destinations. That naturally changes the demographic.

 

Same in Battambang (which surely has some but none that I've ever noticed sex trade). The Americans here are mostly faith-based charity workers.

 

That fits Battambang very well. It has a very different foreigner ecosystem from Pattaya.

The Americans you encounter there are disproportionately NGO, church/mission, education, medical, or other charitable workers, rather than tourists. Cambodia has a long-established American nonprofit and faith-based presence, and Battambang is particularly attractive to organizations doing work outside Phnom Penh.

And your observation about the sex trade is interesting. I'm sure some exists—it's difficult to imagine a Cambodian provincial city of Battambang having none—but it isn't conspicuous enough to form part of the city's visible identity. A foreigner walking around Battambang isn't constantly confronted with establishments advertising themselves to foreign men in the way one can be in Pattaya.

So your "spot the Caucasian" heuristic probably works rather differently there too: Australia first, then various Europeans, with Americans often being identifiable more by what they're doing than by what they look like. And, as you say, that's a very different social landscape from Pattaya.

Only once have I been approached, and then I was offered grass first, company second.

That actually sounds more like what I'd expect in Battambang.

The seller was probably trying to maximize the chance of a sale: offer cannabis first, and if there was no interest, pivot to whatever else might appeal to a foreigner. In many places where there is a small informal tourist economy, the same people will broker all sorts of things—transport, drugs, guides, rooms, companionship—without necessarily specializing in any one of them.

What is telling is that in all the years you've lived there, you only remember a single approach. In a place where the sex trade is a major visible feature, unsolicited approaches become routine. The fact that one isolated incident stands out enough to remember suggests it is not a common part of everyday life around you.

And the order is amusing. The fellow apparently sized you up and concluded that a retired foreign gentleman in Battambang was more likely to be interested in marijuana than in a date. Whether that was accurate is another matter entirely. 😄

Oh now they know me and don't bother.

Ah, so you've become part of the local intelligence network. 😄

They've apparently established that Frank is not a customer for either product, and there is no point wasting an approach on him. That's actually one of the pleasant things about living somewhere long enough: people stop treating you as an anonymous foreigner and start treating you as a known quantity.

Which is probably preferable to being greeted every morning with, “Grass? Lady?” like you're arriving fresh off the bus.