Belief: The Ancient Language — BADN — 3 of 7
When people are sincere in their beliefs, they eventually come to a point where they have to abandon them in the quest for truth.
This is part 3 of a 7-part series.
Click here for part 1
Given that the conditions of our world change faster than any one person’s thinking can capture them, with all the education and insight necessary to make that a legitimate capture, forming our societies on what people like to believe, as opposed to what can be understood, is doomed to lead us to personal stagnation and insecurity, culture lag, the gatekeeping of truth, social stratification, the fragmentation of the species, and a whole host of social conditions that go some ways to ensure a great deal of unnecessary deprivation and oppression.
Belief may have been necessary to navigate through a world with only basic understanding of processes enough for survival and forming the first tribal societies, but the world of today is not the same as the ancient world that the language of belief comes out of.
Now, we have available to us more insight and understanding about our world and ourselves than ever before. Many of our historical perspectives and ways of interacting with this world have been permanently altered in the wake of new information, and most of them will not be coming back. This “out with the old, in with the new” kind of change is a trademark of true personal growth, and wisdom that has been directly applied to how we live.
With that noted, the claim is that humanity has to recognise that it’s a defining characteristic of belief that it seeks to affirm itself — even when hidden beneath the language of open-mindedness* — and that immediately destroys the openness required to reach understanding, closing down avenues of educational exploration as a self-preservation mechanism.
On top of that, the tendency of belief towards self-affirmation creates an angle on which gatekeepers and malicious people can divide societies, create and magnify the insecurities of individuals, and paralyse people’s intellectual growth, curiosity and creativity in order to control them. This can be done easily by convincing someone that they’ve finally found the truth — all they need to do is stick with it and believe in it. As far as they’re concerned, they’re now on the right side of history or the right side of the afterlife, or whatever else they’re being promised.
“The greatest enemy of truth is not the lie, but the belief that you’ve already found it.”
One of the major personal flaws that we can recognise when we’re being honest with ourselves is that the affirming nature of belief immediately creates resistance to scrutinising that belief. Someone is far less likely to stress-test or actively try to disprove something if it’s a deeply held belief. Many people become uncomfortable and understandably defensive when their beliefs are challenged, especially if it’s something they hold close to their identities.
This fear-response can also be seen as very telling about the some of the ways we’re mishandling our ability to think. There are other ways that don’t create these clashes, and don’t evoke fear of personal breakdown over the notion of discovering truth.
Aside from the self-affirming nature of belief, it’s useful to recognise the self-replicating and tribalising nature of the concepts themselves. Not only do we struggle to recognise the rightful place for our ability to think — we struggle most with the devices and objects of our thinking.
When our beliefs and ideologies make their way into concerning our personal identities, it is all-too-easy to perceive a personal attack out of the disagreement of others. Not only does the belief lose its original potential focus on truth, but is now somehow interested in personal validation and other ego-interests through having others readily agree, rather than to explore and critique the reasoning behind it.
With their new motivation to get the nod from others, a division is instantly created between those who share the perspective and those who don’t. The modern world is full of evidence of the sharing and iron-fisted enforcement of ancient self-preserving belief systems, and the division that has been wrought as a consequence of them is still at the bottom of the great majority of unnecessary suffering in the world today.
The deliberate shutting down of our own awareness in favour of supporting currently held beliefs is unlikely to ever remain a personal thing. In explaining their perspectives to others, believers and disbelievers alike need to go to some lengths to conceal the flaws in their reasoning, and so they immediately have more than enough reason to try to control other people’s thinking through pushing their views and projecting misleading abstractions, and this forms a protective circle through development of a kind of belief-oriented tribalism.
And, on the point of division, it’s important to note that it’s commonly recognised that, for every belief, there’s an opposition. Therefore, to organise our societies based on belief and ideology instantly and inherently divides that society, effectively producing our own social fragmentation and making it necessary to base our cultures on peer-pressure and indoctrination with half-assed propaganda — non-answers, and answers that kill the curiosity behind the question.
Here’s a small passage from James Harvey Robinson’s Mind in the Making:
“The Greek thinkers had all agreed in looking for salvation through intelligence and knowledge. But eloquent leaders arose to reveal a new salvation, and over the portal of truth they erased the word “Reason” and wrote “Faith” in its stead; and the people listened gladly to the new prophets, for it was necessary only to believe to be saved, and believing is far easier than [understanding.]”
The actual word he uses at the end there is “thinking.” I replaced it with understanding to emphasise the difference between understanding and thinking, as belief is a device of thinking, and understanding transcends what we think and believe. I could have just as easily replaced it with “gaining insight.”
Thinking is no shortcut to truth, and belief, no matter how nostalgic we might like to be about it, is one of the number one causes of us being averted to truth and avoiding it for whatever reason.
The intention of the Believe and Disbelieve Nothing philosophy is to utilise a language of thinking that can not give rise to belief systems, guided by the philosophical and scientific insight that belief systems are self-contained devices of our thinking. In short, they are an ancient habitual abuse of our ability to think, naively trying to wrap reality up in our imaginations and reason with inadequate, primitive language.
This is about attempting a conscious upgrade of the language of our thinking, partly by constant recognition of the errors of the past, and part of that would mean rebuilding the broken pieces of our perspectives where belief once dominated — while being guided not to attempt to rebuild in the very same language of belief.
Through this conscious upgrade, we will attempt to see to it that the age of belief is over, gone with the curiosity-crushing, species-fracturing attitudes and ideologies that it will eventually be known for.
* Many belief systems speak languages of unity, truth, openness, freedom, and so on, but none of them can offer it — and the cruel irony is, the majority of them feed people the incentive and the will to gatekeep any glimpse of unity and truth, because it will inevitably lead them away from that belief.
