On Beliefs
Stay focused, y’all.
I’m chewing through this set of thoughts.
Belief
Everyone has beliefs. It is intrinsic to the human condition to believe things. In every moment we operate, in every moment we make a choice, we are using our beliefs to inform that choice. There is a point where our experiential knowledge ends and our belief systems begin.
How we relate to belief
We have choices about how we relate to beliefs. Some people consider their beliefs to be absolute truths. To me, this is not a practical way to navigate the world. I relate to my beliefs (consciously, at least) as tools for navigation, like sails on a ship that can be lifted or lowered, or changed. Cosmic truth is larger than can fit inside me. My beliefs orient me to the universe, and they shift as the universe shifts, as my position changes, as my positions change.
How we form belief
Everyone forms beliefs from two types of basis..bases…basises…wtf?
The plural of “basis” is “bases.” That PMO.
Okay. Beliefs are formed from two bases (plural of basis, not base).
Rational bases: Beliefs are:
• syntheses of factual observations and experiences: a convergence of rays.
• derived along the linear pathway of premise to conclusion. This is called logic.
Irrational bases: Beliefs are:
• associated from sensed similarity to extant beliefs. (resonance) (cloud) This is called superstition when it does not resemble logic, and conjecture when it does.
• selected for tribal alignment. (resonance) (connection)
Everyone on the planet uses a blend of rational and irrational methods in forming their beliefs.
Not everyone uses the same proportion. In some people, one or the other may be very little.
There are a lot of people who are accustomed to forming their beliefs based mostly — almost exclusively — on tribal alignment, with occasional support from flashes of connection of premise-to-conclusion. These flashes are just enough for them to feed their cognitive dissonance.
When I say “a lot of people,” I mean, like, a lot. Huge portions of the population.
Tribal alignment is very important to people in this kind of culture. It is at the heartbeat of their daily lives. They live in constant, lizard-brain awareness of the question of whether they are aligning with or against the tribe. It is more important to them than almost anything else.
Everyone in the world is capable of cognitive dissonance. Even the most intelligent people in the world experience cognitive dissonance.
Intelligent people are also often born into situations where their upbringing gives them only tribal values, and cognitive dissonance is required. It is often the case that these intelligent people will find pockets of coherence within their fractured belief systems wherein their intelligence is very active and strong. The strength and activity of their intelligence helps them feel more at ease, because it feeds their self-concept as an intelligent person and helps them to reassure themselves that the cognitive dissonance is not real.
Cognitive dissonance is not comfortable.
Many people are accustomed to it as a way of life, especially people for whom tribal alignment is of overriding importance. But, people are able to accustom themselves to all kinds of things. And cognitive dissonance remains uncomfortable, even for those people for whom it is as important as eating.
When you or someone else is determined to align with the tribe, logic cannot penetrate that determination. Cognitive dissonance is like a force field and it is not going to suddenly break just because someone from outside of the tribe said something that “makes sense.”
In many cases, people who rely heavily on tribal alignment to form their beliefs:
…are accustomed to being able to basically trust the systems that form their beliefs as reliable, supportive, trustworthy, etc. Not in a truly coherent way, but in a way that minimally with their experience, and sometimes positively affects it. And also, in a way that presents enough trappings of rationality so that the cognitive dissonance can be comfortable: look, our tribe is associated with facts and logic; look, we connect premise to conclusion, and fairly often in fact.
…see the entire world with a tribal sheen. They believe that belief is a fundamentally tribal affair and that everyone is on the same page. They do not see “disagreement” as a different perspective on reality, but as opposition like one football team opposes another: beliefs are slogans that represent tribal energy, not representations of worldviews.
That is what I’m chewing on. Because I’ve written it to substack (the void) and not Facebook (people I know generally) or in an email (people I know specifically), it comes out sort of mechanical, dry, bloodless, not necessarily coherent. But I feel that it represents a basic outline of the premises I’m sitting in.
Before I go to the next section I want to emphasize this:
We all have places where our rational bases of belief stop, and irrational ones start. Even the smartest people in the world.
It is not a bad thing. It is a normal human thing.
Considering “having irrational beliefs” in itself to be bad, or stupid, means that we will repress our awareness of our own irrationality. We will not be able to relate to it in ourselves. We will not be able to have useful awareness of how we are navigating the world of belief.
We need to release judgment from our own irrationality before we can go wading out in the world beyond ourselves and our tribe.
Until we release that judgment, we cannot identify, with neutrality, the point where our beliefs cross over into irrationality.
A belief being irrational doesn’t mean that it’s false/wrong. It could be coincidentally correct, and it could be intuitively correct. We should not disregard our irrational beliefs. We should simply hold them more lightly.
What I think I’m getting at here is…
…stay focused.
Don’t get derailed.
Yeah, that’s what I’m getting at. I’m preaching. I want everyone to stay focused.
Really, I want to stay focused. I’m preaching at everyone, because preaching at everyone amplifies my own voice loudly enough so that I can hear it.
There are people who are ready to be ready. There are people who are ready to be ready to open their eyes to the fact that they cannot trust the source of their tribal beliefs anymore. There are people who are ready to be ready to understand that rational forces can and should be more important than tribal forces.
Those are the people we should be in dialogue with: these people at the margins.
Stay focused. Don’t get baited. You have tribal beliefs too. Oh boy, do you ever. How I want to be on the “blue team”! But my entire news feed is blue team people chanting slogans as brainless as any cheerleader chant at a football game.
Stay focused. You’re being baited from all sides. It’s not just the read team baiting you. You are going to be presented with things that confirm your beliefs but sound tribal. When you repeat those things sloganistically, you feed the belief that this is football team versus football team. You lose the game. Stay focused.
Stay focused. Don’t get baited by the red team. Oh boy, do I ever. I get out there insulting. I don’t give a shit. When you start insulting, Emma, reel yourself back in. Oh, the fishing metaphor is tangling up, isn’t it? I’m not the fish anymore getting baited, I’m the fisherman with a rod and a worm and a hook. The lake is fucking Facebook, the hook is my emotions, the worm is my wiggling bleeding heart blue-team beliefs… and I don’t want to catch any red fish. Stay focused. Trawl around in the lake as long as you can without your line going taut. When it goes taut, reel back. Fighting in the streets doesn’t help your cause. It’s only a cue that you’ve gotten useless to the cause and that it’s time to reel back.
Stay focused. What are you looking for in these interactions? Are you trying to hurt people? Are you trying to stir division?
If you don’t know what you’re looking for, reel your hook back in.
I have kind of an idea of what I’m looking for, but it’s time for me to go take a walk. It’s the time of the clock for that. And I also need to chew on that idea.