Purposefully Adopting Beliefs – Part 2

The decision to deliberately adopt beliefs naturally raises the question of how this can be done. What approach do we follow, what techniques can we devise to help us dispense with harmful views in favour of those that serve our highest good? Will a single approach suffice, or do we need to tackle different kinds of beliefs in different ways?

In this context, I find it useful to distinguish between three kinds of beliefs. They differ in how visible they are to us, as well as in how much influence they exert over our lives. Some beliefs are quite explicit and readily subjected to validation. Some others lurk beneath the surface and only betray their presence by the influence that they have on more explicit beliefs. Still others are buried so deeply within our worldview, with so many layers of beliefs placed on top of them, that it is very difficult for us to realise that they even exist, let alone assess their soundness.

The most visible beliefs are those that promptly follow from observations made by the physical senses. A single encounter with a hot stove, for example, is typically sufficient to cause us to keep away from all kinds of hot objects without having to repeat the experience with each one in turn. We can directly observe the burn marks that result, and acutely feel the accompanying pain. It is a simple matter to determine what has brought on the emotional state, and just as simple to decide whether we like it or not. Its drawbacks are self-evident. Should we happen to hold a contrary view, dispensing with it becomes a simple matter of touching a hot stove.

This is not the case with beliefs that lurk beneath the surface. We cannot trace those beliefs to any single observation. They are aggregate in nature – they amount to conclusions drawn from multiple, sometimes a large number of, related observations without being directly reducible to any one of them.

We can take as an example the commonly held belief that every person should earn their keep. Having grown up in a failing socialist country, this view featured prominently in my childhood. With such a belief, we cannot identify a single situation that undeniably supports it the way we can with the belief about the danger of touching hot objects. A number of observations can contribute to it – that we’ve had to work for what we have, that our collective resources are limited, and so on. Historical developments, such as the collapse of communism, also have their part to play. Even our value system – our attitude towards work and our sense of fairness – add their weight to the conclusion.

This leaves us with a belief that is quite abstract in nature, with only an indirect link to our senses. Without a direct observation to trace the origin of the belief to, determining its usefulness can be a murky affair. We might end up having to examine each contributing observation in turn, and perhaps even propose a viable alternative belief, just so that we can establish the worth of the belief that we actually hold.

Our ally in this task is the very nature of belief systems. To be effective, a worldview must be internally consistent. We need to be convinced that each belief that we hold fits in seamlessly with the others. While there are ways to soften the requirement for coherency – rationalisation can be surprisingly effective at allowing two contradictory beliefs to coexist within the same worldview – they have their limitations. These limitations are aggravated whenever contradictions are brought out into the open.

The strong preference for internal consistency in our worldview makes the task of challenging these abstract, embedded beliefs substantially easier. If one of them is faulty, we don’t need to demonstrate this in every instance; it is sufficient that we show how it gives rise to undesirable consequences on one or two occasions to destabilise the belief structure as a whole.

If our worldview contains faulty beliefs, how is it that we have come to harbour them? Why didn’t we simply discard them at the outset?

In some cases, beliefs that we have reason to consider faulty were not always so. We grow and mature during the course of our lives, and beliefs are not exempt from this process. A belief that made perfect sense in our youth might be perceived as a transition step to better ones later in life. While our evolutionary nature does account for some deficiencies in beliefs, the bulk of them stem from the manner in which beliefs are frequently adopted.

Acquisition of beliefs begins in early childhood and is the most pronounced during our formative years. It is partly rooted in experience and partly derived from various authority figures – peers, parents, teachers, celebrities, priests, scientists, philosophers – who serve as our role models and whose work exerts a definitive influence on the way we perceive the world and ourselves.

Much of this process, especially during childhood and adolescence, proceeds unconsciously. We learn by observation – we come to see the world the way others see it, and relate to it the way they do. By the time we are mature enough to carve our own path through life, we have already constructed an elaborate belief framework from borrowed material. This framework guides our decisions even as we are busy deciding how to alter it.

Because many of these beliefs were borrowed, the only assurance of their usefulness that we have is the authority of the people or organisations from which we’ve acquired them. To be certain, we need to validate these beliefs through personal experience.

If we believe that everyone should earn their keep, this will become apparent through other beliefs that it sponsors – that working adults must plan for their retirement, that beggars should not be given charity, and so on. These beliefs will in turn govern our actions, prompting us to make long-term investments and chide or disregard beggars when we encounter them. The actions will produce experience, which we can then examine. Does long-term financial planning enrich our lives? Is it little more than a stressful necessity?

Even better, we can sometimes disregard the counsel of our beliefs to act in ways that oppose them. This will produce more diverse experience which will make for more accurate comparison. The process is by no means easy – strongly engrained beliefs can be difficult to discard no matter what our experience tells us – but this typically has more to do with the willingness to acknowledge errors than the ability to spot them.

In some instances, however, the very presence of an internalised belief inhibits contradictory personal experience. This is because we tend to reason our way to action. Reasoning is mental analysis of the relevant data, which in this case has been adopted from other people. Analysing this data will steer us in the direction of the adopted conclusion, which will prevent us from acting in a manner that contradicts it.

If we are convinced that beggars must earn their livelihood like the rest of us, for example, an analysis of the situation will be so heavily biased against giving them charity that we will not seriously consider doing so. As a result, we will act out our entrenched belief time after time, never giving competing beliefs an opportunity to demonstrate their worth. This will prevent contradictory experience from ever taking place, leaving us ill-equipped to evaluate the belief against its competitors.

Because it is thinking about the appropriate course of action that prevents us from considering alternatives, a way to overcome this limitation is to act before we think. When the situation presents itself – by encountering a beggar at a street corner, for example – we need to act on impulse, before our mind reasons us out of it. Instead of turning away and walking on, we can spontaneously give them some money or some food, show interest in them, or act in whatever way first comes to mind, before the dominant sentiment asserts itself.

This uncharacteristic conduct will produce consequences. They might enable us to see the beggar as a distinct individual with his or her own life story rather than just a stereotype. We might feel compassion for their predicament or irritation for their self-defeating acceptance of it. We might come to associate giving with the experience of abundance rather than sacrifice and personal loss, which will prompt us to re-examine our value system. Whatever our experience, we can use it to gauge the appeal of the beliefs that would have sponsored it.

The process is likely to challenge some of the accepted wisdom of our culture. Even if it vindicates the borrowed beliefs that we hold, it will still give us an experiential basis for holding them. This will lessen our reliance on other people’s authority and enable us to craft a worldview that we genuinely understand and truly agree with.