If you’re in the market for beliefs, there is of course no shortage. They’re everywhere! You can’t turn around without tripping over one, and that’s been true since long before there was an Internet – a veritable World’s Fair of beliefs.
If you’re in the market for beliefs, Gentle Reader, you’re certainly not alone – many if not most folks in the world are always on the lookout for new ones, or at the very least seeking out maintenance for the ones they already have. But the message here, friend, is that you need not venture out into the marketplace for your belief – you can build your own, in the comfort of your own home!
There are many advantages to building a belief yourself, as opposed to picking it up elsewhere. When you build a belief with your own two hands, you can be assured that all of its parts are up to spec; you can feel confident that it is properly constructed. Most importantly, as the one doing the building, you know it’s going to truly work for you!
Mind you, building your own belief is a painstaking process. It takes a good long while, if you do it properly and apply the required rigor and diligence at every step. It’s easy to see why so many pursue much easier, more convenient sources – talking heads, Internet memes, and remembered stories told at Grandma’s knee. But these sources – while sometimes offering perfectly serviceable beliefs – often provide no listed contents or ingredients or evidence of inspection (beliefs are, after all, unregulated). One seldom knows how they’re built or the quality of the parts used.
Which brings up another point: if you have picked up a belief somewhere, it’s useful to open it up and inspect it, inspecting it by the same criteria you’d apply in building it yourself – the criteria listed below.
Select only the best assumptions!
The best chefs will tell you with one voice that a meal, no matter how expertly prepared, is only as good as its ingredients. We can agree with that, can’t we? Superb ingredients, superb meal! Shitty ingredients, shitty meal.
Well, the ingredients of a belief work the same way: superb assumptions, superb belief! Shitty assumptions, shitty belief. It’s vital, then, whether building a new belief or examining one picked up elsewhere, to open up that belief and look over the assumptions inside, scrutinizing each one carefully!
Let’s say, for instance, that the belief being examined it, oh, let’s say, Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand – long touted as the keystone of modern economics, and the bedrock of capitalism itself. Its central assumption – that selfishness is intrinsic to human nature – fuels all the claims that follow from the belief, the most important being that, all else being equal, human beings will act in their own self-interest.
If this key assumption is a great one, then this belief is a good one to take on board, because believing it serves up all kinds of feels about the society in which one finds oneself, and a confidence that things will be just fine, even when evidence to the contrary presents.
If this key assumption is shitty, then the feels brought on by the belief are a false euphoria, and Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand doesn’t really explain anything at all. Faith in it, then, is empty.
Just as with the preparation of a meal, then, a single defective ingredient can spoil the whole thing. The lesson: check your ingredients!
What else must be true?
When building a belief, another essential step is to ask yourself: What else must be true, for my belief to be true? That is, is the belief stand-alone? Or are there other beliefs that would likewise have to be true in order for yours to be?
Here’s a great example. It’s the Paul is Dead theory.
In early 1967, a theory began circulating that Beatle Paul McCartney had been killed in a car accident in late 1966 – and had subsequently been replaced by a double, William Campbell. Two years later, a US disc jockey named Russ Gibb took the theory public, sharing a college newspaper article that detailed a lengthy list of “clues” to the death and replacement sprinkled through the Beatles’ later albums.
These clues included the “funeral procession” interpretation of the Abbey Road cover, in which Paul is the deceased; John intoning “I buried Paul!” in the run-off of “Strawberry Fields Forever”; the undeniable presence of the words “Turn me on, dead man” that emerge when you play “Revolution 9” backwards, and about a hundred more. The theory caught fire, spreading around the world, and remained a hot topic through the Seventies, inspiring entire books and websites. It persists to this day.
Well, let’s think about this: for the belief that Paul McCartney died and got replaced by a look-alike to be true, what else must be true?
The list is lengthy! It begins with the obvious: for William Campbell to have successfully taken up Paul McCartney’s life without missing a beat, he would have had to somehow replicated not only Paul McCartney’s looks, but also his voice. And his talent. And his left-handed bass-playing.
Paul has one of the most singular voices in all of modern music history. You would have to believe it is possible to fake that perfectly, and continue faking it for – let's see – another 53 years, without slipping up once.
You have to believe that William Campbell looks so much like Paul that not even his closest friends – or, for that matter, his lover Jane Asher – could tell the difference. Plastic surgery is usually the answer to this one, but surely Jane had access to features of Paul that weren’t so adjustable.
Those are the easy ones. Next comes Paul’s talent: you have to believe that there is someone who can not only replicate Paul’s looks, but his astonishing ability as a songwriter. He is, after all, the most successful songwriter in human history. And since his best works happened after the alleged death/replacement, you essentially must believe that William Campbell was more talented than the original Paul.
And the left-handed bass playing? Forget about it...
To believe that Paul is Dead, then, you have to take on all those other beliefs.
Another example is perhaps a little more contemporary. What does it mean to take on the belief that Climate Change is a Liberal Myth? That the earth isn’t really warming (or, if it is, that it isn’t because of human activity), but that a political party cooked up that story to empower a regulation-happy lefty government.
If that’s the belief you’re after, you have to believe that the tens of thousands of scientists who testify that the data do indeed demonstrate that human activity is warming the atmosphere are all lying. Of course they are, comes the reply; they’re protecting their grant money! Ah, but an overwhelming majority of them aren’t paid by the US government; they aren’t even US citizens. So you have two new beliefs to take on: that US climate scientists are deceitful, even corrupt, and that they have found some way to convince all the other climate scientists to lie for them, to the detriment of their careers.
There are many, many more necessary beliefs here, but I think we’ve made our point: if you’re going to build a sturdy belief, be prepared to build the necessary supporting beliefs – or to inspect the beliefs already out there, on which your belief will necessarily depend!
Does this belief contradict any of my old beliefs?
Oh, this is an important one!!! Suppose you go to all the trouble to build a new belief, and it turns out that the new belief is incompatible with one you’ve already got sitting on the shelf?
Wouldn’t you feel silly? Wouldn’t you be embarrassed? I sure would!
It seems almost beyond imagining that such a thing could happen. But a moment’s thought shows it to be true.
It is common, for instance, for denizens of the US Right Wing to believe that they must stockpile all manner of weapons in their homes, in order to one day defend themselves and their families from the US government. They own more guns between them, they reason, than all the US military combined.
Simultaneously, many of these denizens harbor the belief that the US military should have many tens of billions more dollars per year to spend on weapons than the $700+ billion they already receive.
(There’s also a convenient You-Must-Also-Believe belief here: you must believe that if the US government ever comes for you and your family, they will be limited gun-to-gun face-offs, and suddenly lose the ability to lob a gas grenade through your picture window, or suddenly be able to knock your front door down with a tank, or nuke your town from 30,000 feet.)
Need we say more? Make sure your new belief can play well with your old ones!
Product Comparison!
When building a new belief – or simply shopping for one, for that matter – it's useful to compare it to other beliefs that are already out there. Do you really want to build a belief that doesn’t measure up to better, higher-quality ones?
I guess the easy example here would be religious beliefs: choosing one over another can be very much a matter of product comparison; let’s put them side by side and see which one is more appealing, going through as many as it takes to find one that suits. Except, of course, nobody actually chooses a religious belief that way.
Going contemporary again, let’s consider competing beliefs about Donald Trump. Here are some off-the-shelf options:
Donald Trump is a talentless, craven, self-important nincompoop who had no idea what he was doing.
Donald Trump is a brilliant, powerful, God-fearing genius, and the US was so lucky to have him that he should have been installed in the White House for life.
Clearly, one cannot possess both of these beliefs, as they are mutually exclusive – and, making things worse, each have lengthy phalanxes of You-Must-Also-Believe beliefs. And it’s here that the point resides: when you build out or otherwise take on either of the beliefs above, you must accept all those You-Must-Alsos, realizing that they, too, carry with them some mutual exclusivity. By taking one on, you are acquiescing to limitations in what else you can reasonably take on. Otherwise, you’ll turn into the gun hoarder who wants to throw his money at the Pentagon.
What’s the ROI?
Clearly, building a belief is a big commitment! You have to have a big return for your effort, or it’s just not worth it, right?
A great step here is to look at beliefs you already possess. Pick one or two of them up and ask yourself: what does this do for me?
Here are some common answers to that question:
It makes me feel good! Ah, this one’s a classic! We can safely say that this is by far the #1 answer to Why Do I Believe This?, going back centuries. All too often, we believe something – and fiercely protect that belief! - because it gives us goosebumps. Such a belief can be anything from I’m going to Heaven when I die to I’m really quite something! to JFK and Marilyn Monroe are alive and living in sin in Muncie, Indiana.1 The problem, of course, is that warm fuzzies are not much of an ROI on a belief when the belief itself is false; the euphoria is likewise false, no more substantial than tissue in a brassiere.
It gains me the acceptance of others! If It makes me feel good! is the #1 answer, this one is certainly second. So many times, we build a belief that will gain us approval, or accept without question a belief our particular tribe espouses. This is the engine of both politics and religion, where failure to embrace tribal beliefs generally results in rejection. The problem, of course, is that you are often taking on a very defective belief, one you can never truly use or even enjoy, out of fear of rejection. If the ROI is acceptance – especially if the belief doesn’t make you feel good! - then it’s a poor ROI indeed, because it leaves you feeling compromised.
It’s easier than thinking! This one, too, is pretty common: if a belief goes up on someone’s shelf because they didn’t want to go to the trouble of doing the work of the steps listed above, well, that’s just plain lazy; and it doesn’t apply to you, Gentle Reader, because the whole reason you’re reading this is that you’ve decided to roll up your sleeves!
What are the consequences if my belief is wrong?
Consequences! We’ve all run aground on them at one time or another. From the painful morning-after of a drinking binge to the buyer’s remorse of choosing an incompatible romantic partner, we’ve all suffered fallout from bad choices.
And so it is with belief. We need look no further than the examples above to be assured of this.
What’s the consequence of the belief that climate change is a hoax – especially if enough politicians embrace it? Hm. Human extinction.
What would the consequence of a second Trump presidential term have been? Hm. Human extinction.
Such evaluations are often bidirectional. Consider Pascal’s Wager, which hinges on belief in God. If one lives as though God exists, pursuing a Godly life, and God does not exist - then all one forfeits are a few hedonistic pleasures; if, on the other hand, one lives as though God does not exist, indulging one’s hedonistic impulses, and he in fact does – then one forfeits the promise of Heaven and suffers the damnation of Hell.
On the other hand... if one lives a self-actuated life, with all its hedonistic satisfactions and pursuit of authentic values and pursuits – and Heaven and Hell are actually fictions – then one’s life is beautifully optimized; whereas a life lived in the bomb shelter of the church is an unexamined one, lacking self-determination and authenticity – a tragic, almost incalculable.
I faced a more nuanced version of this challenge in my youth. In my family’s religious tradition, there was this thing called The Rapture, where Jesus was going to someday return and gather up his faithful and fly away with them. Literally. This caused me no end of existential dread. I quote from my childhood memoir, The Smell of the Lord:
“Here I am, a kid who isn’t yet old enough to drive, who has felt isolated and out-of-place all his life, clinging to the one community he’s ever known, with no idea how to actually live in the world – and here’s this proposition of the trumpet blast that ends it all, and I’m left with... what becomes of me?
“On the one hand, the Rapture could happen and I’d be whisked away with my tribe. Did I really want that? The truth was, the most interesting people I knew of almost certainly wouldn’t be whisked away - my favorite authors, Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury and Ursula LeGuin and Kurt Vonnegut, for starters; philosopher Elie Wiesel, by definition; and the Beatles, who were more popular than the Rapturer, and Elton John, who was one of those.
“And on the other, I knew in my heart that I’d already not only harbored but embraced my doubts – my faith had shifted to the stars. So if a Rapture really happened, I’d be left behind – and I didn’t know anything about living in the world to begin with, let alone how to survive a Tribulation without even a family.”
The problem is blatantly clear: if we build a belief without considering the consequences of believing it, we can tangle our lives in knots.
In conclusion...
Well, this has been fun, hasn’t it? There’s lots more to beliefs than most of us routinely consider. Bottom line, building your own beliefs can be a deeply rewarding process, don’t you think? You’ll not only wind up with stronger, more satisfying beliefs that you’ll get a lot more use of; you’ll also shore up the ones you already have, boosting the value of your collection considerably!
So roll up your sleeves and get to work! Happy believing!
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