On Beliefs and Being Wrong

Q. I can’t believe I’m talking to a homeless guy at the Occupy protests about beliefs.

Z. Hey man, I was minding my own business. You came up to me. Besides, do you really know for a fact that I am homeless?

Q. Well, I came up to you because I saw that you’re reading the same book I’m reading, “Being Wrong”(1). I thought maybe you just picked it up from the People’s library and were using it as a pillow or some shit. But apparently you're actually reading it. And to answer your question... no offense but you have that particular look, and smell, of homelessness about you.

Z. You probably assumed I was a crack-head, or that I was demented, or, at the very least, unintelligent, right?

Q. Uh, maybe.

Z. Well, you’d be wrong, no pun intended. In fact, I am indeed homeless. But that doesn’t automatically render me unintelligent. I can’t buy much, but I can read all the books I want for free at the public library, or here at The People’s Library. We all need to be more careful with our assumptions and judgments about people, don’t you think?

Q. You’re right Zack. I am wrong in my assumptions, sorry dude. Actually, you know…I don’t like this right & wrong talk man. You know Marshall Rosenberg? He talks about this communication process he calls “nonviolent communication”. He says we need to move beyond “right and wrong” language because we’re usually making moralistic judgments of people who don’t act in harmony with our own values.(2)

Z. Hang on there. Is it the language itself that’s the problem? Or is it our culturally constructed perception of right and wrong that’s an even bigger problem? Although we should certainly try to avoid the harsh, judgmental right/wrong language that we fling on each other so often today, we need to be careful that we are not merely being relativistic or politically correct in our avoidance of right and wrong. In other words, there is a difference between judgment and discernment. Discernment is based upon objective analysis and facts, and the recognition that some truths are truer than others, and that some things are more “right” than others, and that some things are more “wrong” than others. Not only do we need to know how to discern, it is demanded of us to speak out about what’s right and wrong in our world, but not in an absolutistic, black and white manner.

And if we talk about moralistic truth’s…here again we need to be careful that we are not merely being morally relativistic. Sam Harris makes the argument that regarding “age-old questions of right and wrong, and good and evil…there are right and wrong answers to the most pressing questions of human life. Because such answers exist, moral relativism is simply false.” In other words, we can use facts and science to help us make moral decisions. There ARE “objectively right and wrong answers grounded in empirical facts about what causes people to flourish”, and causes the “greatest wellbeing of conscious creatures”.(3) So those things, those truths, that are more life affirming, more supportive of the continuance of our species, are simply more right than something that’s less life-affirming.

Q. I see what you mean Zack. Fair enough. Please proceed.

Z. Okay, did you know that one of the biggest problems in the world now is that we can’t really know for sure what the truth is? And, therefore, we resort to “belief”. And if those beliefs need to change, it’s a bitch to do it, because we hate to be wrong, you know? That’s quite a conundrum don’t you think?

Q. Um…not sure I follow.

Z. Okay, let me put it this way:
1. we can’t know the truth the way things are,
2. so we have to resort to belief, and
3. our beliefs are difficult to change if we need to, because
4. we hate to be wrong.

Q. Uh. I’m not sure where you’re going with this, but how about we start with number one?

Z. Okay, so the first one is this…we can’t know the truth the way things are.

Q. That’s a pretty strong statement Zack. Does that mean we can’t even know empirical truth? And what do you mean when you say, “the way things are”?

Z. Well, our world right now is not set up to “know the truth”. In other words, the way things are, the way we humans have structured things, we can’t know the truth. We have built up interdependent social systems—monetary, political, educational, religious, etc.—that skew the truth. The whole notion of truth is unreliable today. There’s no authenticity, no objective knowledge that we can trust. We can’t really know what the truth is, because we can’t trust the truth, can’t trust the facts, can’t trust motives, can’t trust the people telling us the truth, and we can’t accurately interpret scientific facts. We don’t even know what to “believe” in. Actually we shouldn’t have to believe in anything; we should let the facts and truths speak for themselves. But we can’t because the systems we have created, the mindsets we have become accustomed to, and the conditioning we have let ourselves accept…all skew the truth.

Of course there are certain truths, like absolute spiritual truths, that can only be ascertained through first-person experience. And there are relative truths that can change from person to person, or from culture to culture. But what I’m talking about here is the empirical scientific objective truths, or facts, that can either be proved or disproved, a-priori or a-posteriori, epistemological, self-evident or not. We can’t even count on these today.

The historian Howard Zinn wrote about this fact, that even our history, our account of what we think actually happened, is distorted. In Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States Since 1492”, he writes, “The historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual.” (4)

So Zinn tells a different history of early America; not the version of the political and economic elite, but that of the common people. And the truths he reveals are very different, and much more disturbing than what we were taught in school. But almost as disturbing is the notion that we really can’t rely on, and indeed need to reconsider, just about everything we were ever taught.

Q. Wow, that is disturbing.

Z. Disturbing yes, but also potentially liberating if the realization sinks in that we need to question what we are still being told today. And isn’t that what the Occupy Wall Street movement is about? People are waking up and questioning the story we are being told by the political and economic elites and the media they control. People are beginning to see that money and power skew everything, to such an extent that we really never know what the facts and truth are.

Let’s just take a look at one example, climate change. People on all sides of the argument—whether you're a climate researcher whose dependent on grant money, or an energy company looking at stiffer regulation, or a potential trader of cap-and-trade carbon credits—all have vested interests in their entrenched positions. There’s a lot of money to be made (or lost) on either side, so how can anyone really know for certain what the facts are about climate change.

Q. Great point Zack.

Z. So what does that leave us with…having to decide what to believe. I was shocked the other day when I heard in an interview a progressive activist say, “…because there’s so many different facts, and things are so out of control, and the questions are so big, at a certain point you just have to decide what you believe”.

Wow. Do you find this as disturbing as I do? Isn’t it a sad state of affairs that in this day and age, so many years after the age of enlightenment, the age of reason, that we can’t determine fact from fiction? That we can’t agree on empirical truth…that facts don’t matter…and that we just have to “decide” what to believe?

And according to a recent study, we are “allergic to the facts” and actually seek out, and find comforting confirmation from experts who agree with our pre-existing beliefs. They call this “cultural cognition”(5).

Q. Or “confirmation bias," right?

Z. Yes. And don’t even get me started on politics man. Studies show that “once people form an opinion, they go to great lengths to avoid having to revise it. If anything, objective showings that they are wrong cause people to dig in and develop a stronger belief in the idea they initially got wrong. The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong"(6).

Then what do we do? We vote people into office who can never admit their mistakes, or else they would never get voted in. And we vote by consensus, so majority wins, whether the majority is right or wrong. We vote based off of gut instinct, or emotion, or cultural cognition, or ideology or monetary interests, instead of voting by reason and logic and facts. The sad part is, even if we did vote based on facts, how can we ever really trust that those facts, given the all-powerful distorting influence of money and power in our political system.

So can we really blame anyone for believing in anything no matter how crazy, when it’s so hard to know what the truth is?

Q. Shit, we have a problem. Because we really need to shift our beliefs, and wake up to the facts and reality of how messed up things are in our world right now.

Z. Yes I think so. We need to face the facts. If humanity is going to survive, let alone thrive, we have to change our story, because the beliefs that those stories are based upon are flawed, outdated, or simply don’t work anymore.

Q. I’d say we need to change that story pretty damn quickly.

Z. Well that gets to my final point that our beliefs are difficult to change. In his book “Born to Believe," Dr. Andrew Newberg talks about how “the brain is a stubborn organ. Once its primary set of beliefs has been established, the brain finds it difficult to integrate opposing ideas and beliefs. This has profound consequences for individuals and society and helps to explain why some people cannot abandon destructive beliefs, be they religious, political, or psychological”(7).

Okay, here’s a big paradox, about who’s right and who’s wrong, particularly in regard to climate change. Naomi Klein said in a recent article, “let me be absolutely clear: 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists attest, the Heartlanders [Heartland Institute] are completely wrong about [climate] science…But when it comes to the real-world consequences of those scientific findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our economic system, the [climate deniers] may be in considerably less denial than a lot of professional environmentalists…that assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying “green” products and creating clever markets in pollution.”

“…The deniers [took] a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands. They have concluded that this can be done only by radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their “free market” belief system…Passionate corporate and conservative foes of curbs on greenhouse gases are right in asserting that a meaningful response to global warming would be a fatal blow to free markets and capitalism.”

She concludes with a pretty strong statement about the radical nature of what needs to be done:

“The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilization paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence”(8).

Q. So if beliefs are difficult to change, and we desperately need to change our beliefs, then what do we do? Are we just screwed?

A. Don’t worry. It will become more apparent over time, as our systems continue to break down, that our beliefs will have to change, and thus we will be more open to change. When the bio-psycho-social pressures become great enough, what once was considered radical becomes practical. It will become apparent very soon that what’s needed is not horizontal change (reform) but instead vertical change (r(e)volution) to a new human paradigm altogether, one that is completely aligned with nature. We are so lucky to be alive at such an exciting time. There is so much potential, so much good coming, right around the corner; we just have to choose to make it happen. And the first thing we need to choose to change is our mindsets.

Q. I guess that is where the book we’re both reading comes in, huh? That we need to somehow be wrong?

A. Yes actually, we need to allow for the possibility that we might be wrong, all of us. All of us have played a part in creating our world, and our current paradigm. So all of us have to be willing to admit that maybe the world we created is no longer working for us. And perhaps most importantly, we need to change our perception that being wrong is a bad thing.

In a speech to the RSA, the author of the book we’re reading, “Being Wrong," Kathryn Schulz said, “The great minds of the scientific revolution for instance were incredibly excited about error. They understood that it is only when belief systems collapsed, when things did not go as planned, that that’s when things got interesting, that was when you learned the most, that was when you had a chance to completely reconstruct your worldview…The creative minds of the enlightenment, and in fact the creative minds of every era, have all understood the centrality of doubt to their own work.”

She went on to say, “In many, many cases when arguments about right and wrong are on the line, there’s not that kind of simple truth. Very often to be right is to be in the majority, to share the consensus view. And in that sense what we think of as right and wrong is fundamentally a social construct. It’s what’s widely accepted, and those people whose view deviates from the consensus one are wrong. “1

By the way, I heard somebody at the protest the other day shouting out, “it’s not about left or right, it’s about right and wrong”. That person was correct in one sense, that we need to move beyond the divisive left/right, liberal/conservative, thinking. But I’m not sure about his idea of who’s wrong. Maybe it’s not just the 1%.

We ALL need so badly right now to be okay with being wrong…all of us, about everything. Not just the Christians or the Muslims, not just the 1% Wall Street bankers and capitalists, not just the conservative republicans, not just the atheists and scientific materialists, but all of us. Yes, even the environmentalists, the new agers, the green entrepreneurs, the progressives, the democrats, the liberals. We all have to allow ourselves to be wrong…we need to be radically wrong about the way we think the world is supposed to work, to release our beliefs, and our certainty, and our attachment to our current world-views and systems. We need to be radically wrong about what we think is impossible or too idealistic or too impractical. We need to consider that our existing paradigms, in regard to economics, to politics, to education, to everything, might be wrong. And in a paradoxical way, we will find the rightness, the truth, the liberation, and the beauty of a whole new way of being and thriving.

Q. Wow, powerful dude. But if we are acknowledging all the things we are wrong about, then what’s right?

Z. Well, the Occupy movement that has spread around the world is in the early stages of what it might become, currently focusing on what’s wrong in our world, and what’s not working for the 99%. But now it’s time to take it to the next level, to acknowledge that perhaps we might be wrong about what we think the sources of our problems are. Maybe it’s not governments, or capitalism, or the 1% banker elites that are the problem. Perhaps it is our social system itself that is the root cause, with human behavior and its resulting effects (corruption, pollution, wars, waste, exploitation and hence distortion of values and psychology) being symptoms of this fundamental root source. Perhaps it is our monetary-based economic paradigm itself that is at the core of most of our global problems, which have brought us to the brink of extinction. From that realization, then the solutions can emerge.

Q. Not sure I follow. Are you saying money itself?

Z. I am indeed. I think it’s time to occupy the monetary system itself. People around the world are beginning to arrive at a powerful new realization, that our practice of rationing resources through monetary methods is irrelevant and counterproductive to our survival. It is time that we perceive the solution as evolving beyond the monetary system all together to ensure our survival.

Q. Now I’m starting to think you really are just a crazy old homeless dude after all. How the hell can we ever get beyond money? Are you talking about going back to some type of barter system?

Z. No, not at all. I’m talking about what’s being called a "resource-based economic model"(9), a holistic social and economic system in which the planetary resources are held as the common heritage of all the earth's inhabitants. It is a system in which all goods and services are available to everyone without the use of money, credits, barter, or any other form of debt or servitude(10). After all, that’s mostly the system we’ve had for about 95% of human existence(11), and one which was most nobly expressed in some of the Native American Indian cultures(12). Some people, like Steve McDonald, are envisioning that we are now entering a period in our evolution that some are calling “Neo-tribalism," where “we begin to see the Earth as one complex living system with its own intelligence, and ourselves as an integral part of it all. Now the tribe is humanity itself and our sacred land is planet Earth. There’s a trend towards a non-interfering minimalistic lifestyle that’s in harmony with nature, while maintaining all the advantages of our high technology.”(13)

Q. Wholly shit man. I like the sounds of it, but that’s some utopian stuff. But, given our whole discussion here today, I’m open to being wrong. I will look into this thing you call a resource-based economic model and try to get my head around the idea of a world without money.

Hey Zack, gotta run. It’s been enlightening talking to you man. You are so “righteous” dude, ha ha.

Z. Are you sure about that? Keep in mind that I’m just a homeless bum. I could be totally wrong about everything we just discussed.

Off I go in search of a meal and a cardboard box or tent to sleep in. By the way, can you spare any change?

“Where there is recognition of right there must be recognition of wrong; where there is recognition of wrong there must be recognition of right.” Chuang Tzu 2

Fonte: On Beliefs and Being Wrong: An Occupy Discussion with a Homeless Guy Named Zack