The secret to life is that: “we are what we believe”.
- Our beliefs define us.
- They motivate us.
- They explain us as a person.
Human beings are highly logical but we are limited by what we know (believe) and by the quality of that information. Most of us lack the opportunity, motivation, and resources to confirm our beliefs and unknowingly treat them as facts. Consequently our beliefs are often times more important and more influential in our life than are facts. Stated another way, our perception (of reality) is often times more important and influential in our life than is reality.
Our beliefs reflect our perception of reality. If we want to fully understand our life we need to identify, examine, and qualify our beliefs.
Our beliefs are a unique product of our personal experiences and our innate abilities and characteristics. The primary source of our beliefs is our culture. Therefore we need to examine our culture to understand our beliefs. And until we are able to transcend our culture (collective perceptions of reality), we will be limited by and to it.
We are so very much a product of the culture that shaped us that we often fail to recognize it as a artifact of our own making, until we are faced with a very different culture.Leakey, Richard. The Origin of Humankind, BasicBooks, 1994.
Indeed, we are products of culture far more then we are products of any other single force that shapes our behavior.Schumaker, John F. Wings of Illusion, Prometheus Press, 1990.
Life
By life I mean from an inner mental prospective. This is about who we are as a person, our thoughts and feelings, our hopes and fears.
Secret
This is a secret hiding in plain sight, obscured by the surplus of information in the world. It is the most fundamental piece of information we can have because it explains everything we know, think, and feel.
“ For centuries man lived in the belief that truth was slim and elusive and that once he found it the troubles of mankind would be over. And here we are in the closing decades of the 20th century, choking on truth. There has been so much brilliant writing, so many genial discoveries, so vast an extension and elaboration of these discoveries – yet the mind is silent as the world spins on its age-old demonic career.
…One of the reasons, I believe, that knowledge is in a state of useless overproduction is that it is strewn all over the place, spoken in a thousand competitive voices. Its insignificant fragments are magnified all out of proportion, while its major and world-historical insights lie around begging for attention.”Becker, Ernest, The Denial of Death, Free press Paperbacks, 1997
Restatement
This is a restatement of the nature / nurture argument: That we are a product of both our nature and our nurture, with an emphasis on nurture (culture).
Real World Evidence
The three concepts of 1) prior knowledge, 2) confirmation bias, and 3) censorship are the tools that societies, governments, and institutions use to influence (control) our beliefs.
- Prior knowledge obtained during childhood is almost always taken for granted because it is invisible to the subject (but is obvious to an outsider).
- Confirmation bias shows up as cognitive dissonance, partisan politics, and echo chamber in the news.
- Censorship is everywhere in the form of blasphemy laws, book burning, and state control of the internet, etc.
Historical Evidence
These concepts have been used for good and for bad throughout history.
What is learned in the cradle is taken to the graveProverb
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.Proverbs 22:6
Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.Aristotle, The Philosophy of Aristotle
Give me the children until they are seven and anyone may have them afterward.Saint Francis Xavier
Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction.Adolf Hitler
If the older generation can not get accustomed to us, we shall take their children away from them and rear them as needful to the Fatherland.Adolf Hitler, June 1933
We begin with the child when he is three years old. As soon as he begins to think, he gets a little flag put into his hand. Then he follows the school, the Hitler Youth, the SA and military training. We don’t let him go. And then when adolescence is passed, then comes the Arbeitsfront, which takes him again and does not let him go until he dies, whether he likes it or not.Robert Ley, Nazi labour chief, 1938
Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Managing Your Life
We also draw together when we become aware that night must close in on all living things, that we are condemned to death at birth and that life is a bus ride to the place of execution. All of our struggling and vying is about seats on the bus, and the ride is over before we know it.Eric Hoffer
To acknowledge that we are a product of our environment doesn’t imply that we are helpless against it. Managing our life suggests a degree of control.
We can change who we are, at any point in our life, by changing our beliefs. And the necessary first step for this change is awareness of our situation.
The Fate Of The Average Man
A chance of fate determines the society and culture we are born into: our gender and race roles, our nationality, language, religion, social class, etc. Then the voices of socialization (custom, tradition and public opinion) so overwhelm us that by the time we reach the age of reason we accept them as fact and ride them to our death bed, forever failing to question their initial chance authority. Such is the fate of the average man.
But this isn’t the case for the occasional person who, through a supportive environment or spark of insight or outside influence, recognizes this situation and challenges it. But it takes continuous effort to silence these inherited voices because their authority runs deep and is only incrementally reduced with each successive try.
Each of us owes it to ourselves, our community and future generations to examine these inherited ways of thinking and replace them with a conscious, rational, deliberately chosen set of values and beliefs.