Purposefully Adopting Beliefs – Part 1

Few subjects fascinate me as much as how people come to form their beliefs and the effect that those beliefs have on them. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time over the past few years reading personal accounts of people who had undergone a fundamental revision of their belief system, what triggered it, and how it changed their life.

Most of these stories share a common thread. They involve a sequence of events that destabilise the person’s established notion of reality. These challenges can take many forms – a comment by a friend that reveals an inconsistency in their worldview, living through a personal crisis that illuminates old memories in a new light, learning about scientific or historical evidence that directly undermines the foundation of their beliefs, and many others.

Over a period that can range from weeks to decades, they successfully resist these threats to their belief system by creating inventive explanations in an effort to reconcile their established views with the evidence that threatens them. Eventually, however, the contradictions become too large and numerous to explain away. They reach a tipping point, causing the old worldview to come crashing down.

This is followed by a period of reconstruction during which the people pick up the pieces of their shattered worldview to assemble another. By virtue of starting afresh, the new creation is able to combine the remnants of their old worldview with the evidence that has instigated its collapse into what becomes their new picture of reality.

The reconstruction phase is a time of intense turmoil. This is how it is usually described, and this is what I experienced when I lived through it myself. It leads to a crisis of identity, where the fundamentals of how we relate to the world around us begin to shift. Because we depend on these fundamentals to frame our conduct, we are left without effective guidance while they are in flux. The experience is positively unnerving.

The picture that emerges is that we are not at liberty to choose the beliefs that we want to hold. That choosing is done for us based on the perceived truthfulness of the belief in question. If we consider it to be true, we can’t help but adopt it; false, and we can’t resist discarding it. For a while we may be able to resist it, but it will overpower us in the end. The most that we can do to influence the outcome is to steer clear of the evidence that could potentially unsettle our established picture of reality.

This discovery was accompanied by an intriguing anomaly in the form of determinists – people who consider free will to be an illusion, and decision-making entirely a product of external factors. On the surface, it looked like another triumph of believability over wishful thinking.

There is nothing comforting about determinism. Denying free will is perhaps the ultimate renunciation of a meaningful existence. That these people professed the belief in determinism was a testament to their intellectual honesty. This was the conclusion that their investigation of scientific evidence has led them to. It was how the world worked, as best as they could determine.

The anomaly was that these people nevertheless lived as if they had free will. They strove to fill their life with meaning and purpose, got involved in discussions of what people ought to believe and do, constructed their subjective moral framework, and so on. In short, they paid heed to all the concepts that the absence of free will, when embraced fully, renders obsolete.

This in itself wasn’t surprising; I’ve come across many cases of people saying one thing and doing another, only to deny or rationalise away the discrepancy when it was brought to their attention. I’ve caught myself doing the same often enough. What was surprising for me was that these determinists were fully aware of the chasm between their professed beliefs and their conduct, and felt no need to bridge it. Rather, they allowed the two contradictory worldviews to coexist.

On closer inspection, it became clear to me that the two worldviews served different purposes. Determinism was used to make sense of the world in which they lived, and free will to guide their interaction with it. The former was a product of rational examination of the evidence at hand in an effort to ascertain the true nature of reality. The latter had a strong emotional component that pointed the way to the most desirable way to live. Each worldview performed a distinct function that could not be fulfilled by the other.

This made me realise that we have a genuine capacity to hold more than one worldview at the same time, provided that those worldviews answer different questions. The two questions that emerge from the above analysis are “Is it true?” and “Is it useful?”. If a belief responds favourably to either question, it is a good candidate for inclusion in the corresponding worldview.

Unfortunately, the question of usefulness has acquired a dubious reputation in recent times. As our society has successfully used science to shake off many of the superstitions that have historically gripped it, it has advanced the pursuit of truth as the single overarching goal of human life. Utilitarian considerations have come to be perceived as a sign of weakness, that one is not strong enough or mature enough to deal with the harsh realities of life and so has to seek refuge in fantasy. The alternative that is advanced instead is to embrace the truth as best we can determine it, and find some way to mould it into a guideline for living.

As the example with determinism demonstrates, however, our intellectual exploits can lead us to a belief system that is so devoid of practical advice that no amount of mental gymnastics can extract a useful guideline from it. Because we cannot function without a guideline, a competing worldview will arise to fill the void. We will not be able to shake that worldview no matter how much we may disagree with it intellectually. There is simply nothing else that can take its place.

This leaves us in a position where we have two worldviews that pick themselves – one based on how true we consider it to be and the other how useful. The first derives from the standard of what makes a view believable to us. This standard consists of conclusions – as simple and consistent as we can make them – that we are able to draw from the observations made by our senses. In many cases, it draws on additional sources, such as authority figures and religious scripture.

Formulating such a standard removes wishful thinking from the picture. A view that fails to adhere to the standard of believability will fall by the wayside, no matter how emotionally appealing we may find it. A view that meets the standard will be adopted, no matter how distressing it may be. Indeed, changes to the first worldview can create much turmoil in our lives against our will, as evidenced by the life stories of people who have lived through them.

The second worldview derives from the standard of what makes a belief useful to us. This standard consists of emotions that arise from different life situations that we live through. Its underlying motivation is the pursuit of happiness, manifesting as what we can describe as positive emotions – love, gratitude, abundance. A view is useful if it helps us attain that state of being, and counterproductive otherwise.

This also removes wishful thinking from the process. If we hold a view in high regard and expect it to produce a desirable state of being, only to discover that it has the opposite effect, we will discard it for failing to live up to the set standard. Unlike the situation with the standard for believability, however, this doesn’t mean that we will discard a belief that we find emotionally appealing. Rather, a belief that fails to meet the standard of usefulness loses its emotional appeal as a result. The views that are adopted end up being precisely those that appeal to us, and the ones that are discarded precisely those that deny us happiness.

Of course, the processes of crafting belief systems are full of pitfalls. Just as we can rationalise away inconsistencies between beliefs, we can find happiness in the oddest places – by seeking suffering so that we can elicit sympathy from others, or finding satisfaction in an accurate prediction of our collective doom. The difficulty can be compounded by mental health conditions that inhibit clear thinking. The challenge of finding a successful process and applying it effectively is a formidable one.

The starting point on this journey, however, is the recognition that it needs to be taken, that we cannot rely on our quest for truth to uncover a worthwhile guideline for living. And that, far from being an admission of weakness, is an expression of a desire to live our life at the very height of its potential.