From a Prisoner of Belief Systems to Philosophy and the Scientific Method
“… the population suffers from a fear of change, and challenging one’s belief system usually ends in insult and apprehension, for, being wrong is erroneously associated with failure — when, in fact, being proven wrong should celebrated, as it is elevating someone to a new level of understanding, furthering awareness…” — Peter Joseph
I realise that a great deal of the writing I’m yet to post here concern a lot of things that I probably shouldn’t cover without some personal context; without at least a brief introduction to how I’ve arrived where I have and why I’m even interested in some of these things in the first place.
Instantly, I’m taken right back to a vague, fragmented memory going way back to Year 3 in primary school, so I was probably about 8 or so. A teacher was telling us about “The World”, what’s expected of us, how we’ll eventually go off to work and earn money. I can’t remember exactly what she was talking about, but I remember my reaction being one of confusion. There was something about the things she said that didn’t make sense. They struck me as somehow wrong, although I was so young that I had no framework with which to interpret or express this feeling.
Incidents like this would happen at scattered intervals over the years, and usually only when adults were telling me about the world or giving me non-answers to explain away my annoying curiosities. Still, as the years were passing, it was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore just how much was striking me as ‘wrong’ or ‘off’ about the way life itself was being presented to me.
There was something I used to call a “social conscience” developing within me. By the time I was 15 or so, I was starting to become unhappy with the world around me and I had nowhere to channel that. The extent of my political knowledge was that, every few years, my parents would vote on something; a new name, a new face, and that the people who were the supposed leaders of the country would argue with each other like children and I could watch that on TV if I wanted.
Although I didn’t like it, politics seemed like the way to get things done.
“Man-made laws are attempts to deal with occurring problems, and, not knowing how to solve them, they make a law.” — Jacque Fresco
As young and as ignorant as I was, and growing increasingly desperate to fully realise what it was that seemed to wrong to me and to be able to do something about it, I was prime real estate for some dodgy political ideology to come along and make a home in my head. It just had to appear to make sense. After all, I was in no position to tell what actually did make sense.
One night, while browsing the internet, I stumbled into what can only be called propaganda, and swallowed it whole. From the first glance, it was offering me something that I was lacking; answers, wrapped up in a concise worldview. The first two or three claims it made must have made some kind of sense to me. I wouldn’t have gone further into it if they hadn’t. And so began my journey…
I took on that ‘new’ political ideology, and spent hours engrossing myself in its propaganda and jargon and consciously forcing expansion of my limited view to take on this new global perspective. I accepted new enemies and the new ‘team’ I was given to be a part of, and learned to think and speak as though all this came natural to me and that it was what I was born to do. As this went on, that previous ignorance of mine was completely explained away.
With the clear-cut answers that my new all-encompassing worldview had given to me, I was ready to call people out from my moral soapbox and scold them for their ignorance. On top of that, I had answers for just about everything after just a couple of months, maybe less, and was beginning to get a reputation among my friends and family as a relentless, ruthless debater.
It’s not that I was right about anything — it’s that I was ready to use every dirty trick in the book, every logical fallacy, every chance to redefine a word to pull whoever I was talking to into the context I wanted them in. I made a point of learning how to articulate “my” worldview and to hide my fallacies deep in the words enough that most people my age wouldn’t have caught onto them. I didn’t even know how to spot them myself.
Anyway, my sense of something being wrong in this world never went away, and, some time over the next few years and for reasons I can’t recall, I acknowledged the possibility that I had just injected a whole bunch of what was wrong into my own mind, in effect voluntarily becoming part of the problem. I had understood very little, but I had learned to think very much. My perspective was not one of understanding nor insight — it was one of ideology.
It took a few years and a strange amount of psychological discomfort to learn my way out of this belief system and the personal identity that came with it. On the surface, it was so obviously deluded, but, without a guide or mentor, without the insight to realise that, I was desperate and determined to see it as true.
After breaking free of one belief system, I spent the next X amount of years falling into one after another, pin-balling side to side and back and forth between politics, religion and spirituality, and eventually discovered philosophy — or, should I say, a few philosophers.
Philosophy is a field not without its own pitfalls, but it allowed me the opportunity to put my own goals, my own desires, even my own journey through all these belief systems and identities, under a harsh and humbling microscope.
With that came a glimpse into how different disciplines function, different ways of gaining knowledge, of dealing with information, testing ideas and concepts. The differences between thinking and learning.
Cue an introduction to the scientific method. Without human interference, it’s the only method I can think of off the top of my head that both:
A — starts from a position of, “I don’t know - Let’s find out,”
and B — actively tries to disprove itself wherever possible.
Obviously that struck me right off that bat, as I was living the complete opposite for my entire life up until that point.
Most of our so-called research and reasoning consists merely of finding arguments to go on believing as we already do. — James Harvey Robinson
That only brought me to the humiliating discovery that, underneath every seemingly different ideology and belief system I’d taken on, every identity I once called Me, were the exact same systems. The exact same foundations, even though the ideological lenses I wore and the new language I spoke seemed original each time. The commonalities between them all were so insanely significant that it’s shocking to me that I was ever able to overlook them.
At the bottom of them all was the assumption that “thinking” is an adequate method of dealing with the world and all the new information it’d throw at me. Both the philosophers I was learning from and the scientific method would have me doubt my own thoughts immediately, or at least not just accept them as truth just because I was able to think them.
Up until that point, it suited me down to the ground that I could take on new identities just by thinking them. After all, I’d spent years filtering everything through my thinking. Every event I witnessed or was part of, everything I had to evaluate, every word I spoke and heard, every person I encountered… I was reducing it all to my thinking and wasn’t even aware I was doing it.
My addiction to thinking presented a whole new set of challenges to overcome later.
But at last, after almost twenty-five years, I was finally able to see it, and how it functioned within me.
My interests didn’t so much illuminate what was wrong with the world. Rather, they were gearing me up to make a kind of peace with the way world was, and instead illuminated what was wrong with me.
Humanity didn’t get off to a great start, and neither did I.
But, finally over this tendency to wrap reality up in a nice concise web of reason, I realised there was a lot of work to be done, and if I were to do this work sincerely, I’d have to do it in the interest of truth itself — not in the ego-interests of appearing to know what I was talking about, winning debates, winning respect, or emotional- or identity-oriented comfort, etc.
It almost seems like it was a game to me to begin with; window-shopping for belief systems and playing dress-up, at serious personal cost. I can only be glad I caught it relatively early. All of this gave rise to a new, keen interest into how belief systems and worldviews form, their self-preserving mechanisms, the lenses they force their thinkers to see through, the linguistic and logical systems beneath them holding them that hold them together, etc.
On top of that was a realisation that we live in a world dominated by what people like to think, rather than by what insights we have gained and will gain in the future, and not only does this contribute a hugely significant chunk to the struggles we face as a species, but it strikes me as ridiculous that we constantly delude ourselves into trying to solve these issues with yet more thinking.
Just as a nice blend of philosophical insight and application of the scientific method to the way I think freed me from a great deal of my own existential angst, I suspect the same is true for humanity as a whole; that, if we are to mature and to find any kind of unity and peace between us, then it will take the sacrifice of our comfort, our belief systems, our personal identities and everything we like to think that occasionally has us avoiding certain information.
To end this hyper-generalised little story, I’ll say that Believe and Disbelieve Nothing isn’t just an empty phrase or commandment of some sort. It’s the phrase I’ve come to use to sum up the philosophical discipline that I’ve discovered and developed over the years, and will be going into deep detail about in the near future.
This is what I mean in my Abandoning Atheism post** when I said “I no longer have any confidence in Belief and Thinking as being adequate methods of tackling the tougher questions in life.”
And this is what leads me to be sitting here today… at my desk.
* I’ve yet to post this here. I will do that shortly. Moving from one site to another, I’m trying to avoid dumping content and spamming anyone’s feed.
