Rhinoceros horn for superman: explaining weird beliefs

One of the major threats to the existence of the rhinoceros is that some men believe that eating its impressive horn turns them into sexual supermen, and perhaps more. Whilst I can understand how ignorant people in pre-scientific societies might have believed such things, I have trouble understanding how anyone could believe this today; the facts, however, clearly show that people will pay good money because they hold such a belief. This came to mind when I read "James McCormick guilty of selling fake bomb detectors" on the BBC News a few minutes ago.

This article, which is about the recent conviction for fraud of James McCormick, reports that McCormick made a  £50m fortune by selling fake detectors of  "explosives, drugs, ivory and people" (2013, ¶ 8) mainly at high prices to government defence agencies, whose users on the ground might still be at risk because they continue to believe that it works as claimed.

This is, of course, exactly the same sort of fake device the Thai army wasted a vast amount on in the GT200 scandal, for which I don't think anyone has yet been imprisoned. And the most amazing thing about that, as with McCormick's fraudulent device, is how anyone could ever have believed it might have worked in the first place. There was never any reliable evidence that this device or the GT200 could do any of the things for which Thai tax payers and others spent a fortune, and which, at the same time, probably killed soldiers and others who mistakenly relied on it. I can understand an ordinary soldier in the field trusting his superior officer (maybe) if that officer said there was good evidence, but on what basis could any senior officer make such a claim? I can only think of two explanation: amazing stupidity or deliberate lying. Neither explanation is very nice, but what else is possible? Since the BBC News report also lists countries where McCormick was successful in making sales as "Iraq, Georgia, Saudi Arabia and Niger" (¶ 2), all countries with high corruption levels, I'm inclined to think that all senior army and other people who bought these things did so because they were part of a corruption scheme. On the other hand, these are also countries with low levels of education  where healthy critical thinking is also discouraged and in many cases is strictly illegal, so perhaps the stupidity defence is plausible after all. Still, that anyone would ever buy such things seems to me to reflect very badly on either their intelligence, or their honesty, and perhaps on both.

In level 5 last term, we read about magic, which is an important element of religions according to Hartmann and Blass (2007). These magical beliefs are also often rather strange, and yet the evidence is that many ordinary people do still take them seriously. The test, I think, is whether people will hand over their hard earned money, and many people do pay good money for amulets, medals, relics of saints and so on because they believe these things have some supernatural ability to protect or benefit them in some way. When I was a little boy, my parents, mainly my mother I suspect, insisted on keeping a small statue of St. Christopher on the dashboard of our car in the belief that the saint would then intervene to protect us from an accident. I think all of the good Catholic families of my friends did the same. It seems to have gone out of fashion now, perhaps a recent pope suggested that their might be some doubt as to whether St. Christopher really did one day carry Jesus Christ across a river. I think it's still a great story, but the likelihood that putting a statue in your car will bring down supernatural protection from a god, angel, saint, or any other such being seems to me as well founded as the belief that a piece of plastic and wire coat hanger can detect bombs and drugs, or that eating the ground up horn of a slaughtered rhinoceros will result in a boost to waning sexual vigour - modern drugs like Viagra have much stronger supporting evidence in their favour. But I would also agree with Hartmann and Blass that these sorts of beliefs, however weird and irrational, can effectively "fulfill people's psychological ... needs" (p. 23). Perhaps if they are not directly harming or threatening others, or doing anything else that is directly harmful, we should let people act on their beliefs in magic.

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References

Hartmann, P., & Blass, L. (2007). "The Anthropological View of Religion". In Quest 3 Reading and Writing (2nd ed.) (pp. 23 - 25). New York McGraw-Hill.

James McCormick guilty of selling fake bomb detectors. (2013, April 23). BBC News UK. Retrieved April 23, 2013 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22266051