A Q&A Discussion with a Homeless Guy Named Zack
Q. I can’t believe I’m talking to a homeless guy about beliefs.
Z. Hey I didn’t hit you up. You came up to me man.
Q. Yeah, cause I saw what you’re reading and couldn’t believe you were reading the same book I am, Being Wrong 1. Wow, maybe I was wrong about you…no pun intended?
Z. Slightly. You assumed I was a crack-head, or that I was demented, or, at the very least, unintelligent, right?
Q. Uh…pretty much.
Z. I am indeed homeless, but I’m not unintelligent. I can’t buy much, but I can get all the books I care to read at the library for free.
If you have the time—I certainly do—I want to talk with you about some things that have been on my mind lately.
Q. Uh, you mean besides the problem of being homeless?
Z. Oh that’s nothing. Actually, I’m talking about something much bigger. You know, one of the biggest problems now is the fact that we humans hate to be wrong. So we strive to know what’s right…to know the truth. But the way our world works right now, we can’t really know for sure what the truth is. So, therefore, we resort to “belief”. And then if those beliefs need to change, it’s a bitch to do it. Quite a conundrum don’t you think?
Q. I’m…not sure I follow.
Z. Okay, let me put it this way dude: # 1. humans need to know the truth; # 2. we can’t know the truth the way things are, # 3. so we have decide what to believe, and # 4. our beliefs are difficult to change if we need to.
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 humans have to know the truth. Generally speaking, of course. We are curious, we are adventurous, we want to improve our lives, we like certainty, we don’t like change, we want safety, we want answers, we want purpose, we want to know the meaning of life. For all these reasons we strive to understand our world and how it works. We struggle to survive, to take care of our families, to make life better, to achieve, to grow, to conquer, to love, to share, to find meaning and purpose, to contribute. To accomplish all of these objectives, we need to know. The more we know, the better life will be for ourselves first, and then our loved ones, and then if there’s capacity, to our tribe, or nation, or world. To navigate all of life’s challenges, we seem to think that the more we know—the more truth’s we know—the better. So we go through life trying to close the door on uncertainty, collecting more and more truth’s as if we were collecting boy scout badges, working our way towards ultimate certainty, or truth, so that we can become masters of the universe.
Now, whether we really achieve the ultimate truth is beside the point. We feel good as long as we have built our little box of certainty. We feel good if we have taken as many unknowns as possible from the world and scrunched and smashed and squeezed them into tiny bits of certainty and safely stow them away in our truth box. Our truths make our world feel safe, simple, livable, known. However, our truth’s, and our certainty in them, can become problematic.
Q. Sure, there has been problems from thinking we know all the answers. The whole “world is flat” thing comes to mind. I get all of that. But what do you mean we can’t know the truth? Why the hell can’t we know certain truths?
Z. This is where it gets interesting…we can’t know the truth the way things are. And, by the way, I’m not really talking here about spiritual truths, just empirical objective truth.
Q. What do you mean Zack 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 now, the way we humans have structured things, we can’t know the truth.
Q. Truth is truth. Can’t we know truth when we see it?
Z. Unfortunately not. At least not today. We have built interdependent systems—monetary, political, educational, religious—that skew the truth. The whole notion of truth is unreliable today. There’s no authenticity, no objective knowledge. We can’t really know what the truth is, because we can’t trust the truth, can’t trust the facts, can’t trust motive’s, can’t trust people providing the truth, can’t accurately interpret scientific facts. We don’t know what to believe in. Actually we shouldn’t have to believe in anything—we should let the facts and truth 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 their 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 truths, or facts, that can either be proved or disproved, a-priori or a-posteriori, epistemological, self-evident or not. But we can’t even count on these today.
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?
Q. Yeah, you’d think that we’d be more enlightened and knowledgeable today than we were in the 17th and 18th century, but maybe not. Especially if we can’t agree on some basics facts or universal truth.
Z. No, 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” 2.
I’m a firm believer…no pun intended…that money and power skew everything, so that we really never know what the facts and truth are. (And please don’t peg me as a radical anti-capitalists anarchists.) But take climate change, for example, people on all sides of the argument—whether your 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.
And don’t even get me started on politics dude. 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" 3.
Then look at 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 whether the masses are right or wrong, majority wins. We vote based off of gut instinct, or emotion, or cultural cognition, or ideology, instead of voting by reason and logic and facts. The sad part is, even if we did vote based on facts, how, with the current influence of money and power in our political system, can we ever really trust those facts? Happen to see any political campaign ads recently?
So can you blame anyone for believing in anything? Fundamentalists for believing in an angry god, capitalists for believing in money, scientists for not believing (or believing) in climate change, or new agers for believing in the 2012 prophecy? Objective facts and truth today don’t give us a whole lot of certainty.
Q. Shit, we have a problem don’t we?
Z. Yes, because our beliefs have to change, don’t they? We have to change our story, or the story that we believe in, because our story doesn’t work any longer.
Q. Yes, and I would say we need to change the story pretty damn quickly.
Z. But, given our current systems, our beliefs are difficult to change. In this great book “Born to Believe”, Dr. Newberg talk 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. 4” Of course, the brain is not an intentional organ, with intentionality, and will do whatever we want it to do, but you get the idea.
This lady named Lisa Reagan said in a recent article that “our stories about ourselves – who we are and what we are capable of becoming – are influenced primarily by our worldview, which shapes our lived reality. [Our worldview] is our beliefs, attitudes, perceptions, and assumptions through which one filters their understanding of the world and their place in it. Whatever the story is – created, told, and retold in a habitual, self-perpetuating cycle – it influences our choices and behavior. This is true individually as well as collectively.
The consequences of our 500-year-old model of consumption, profit, and externalized costs in the form of environmental degradation and natural system collapse are mounting. The old story we keep telling ourselves, based on the assumptions listed above, is evaporating, leaving in its place the frantic question “What comes next?” 5.”
Q. Yeah, what does come next? Hopefully, it’s some good news…sheez.
A. Actually, it’s very good news. This is such an exciting time to be alive. 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 is to change our mindsets. Not just christians or the muslims, not just the wall street bankers and the capitalists, not just the conservative republicans, not just the atheists and the materialists, but all of us. Yes, even the environmentalists, the “spiritual but not religious”, the green entrepreneurs, the progressives, the democrats, the liberals. We all have to allow ourselves to be wrong.
Q. Uh, is this were the book we’re both reading comes in? That we need to somehow be wrong?
A. Yes actually, we need to allow for the possibility that we might be wrong, in our current paradigm, in our worldview, in our values, and, most importantly, in our perception that being wrong is a bad thing. In a speech to the RSA, the author of the book were 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 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 who’s view deviates from the consensus one are wrong.1”
We need so badly to be wrong now…about everything. Since everything that we thought was right, simply isn’t working any longer. We were wrong in thinking we could solve our problems strictly on one side of the coin…the side where we change our thoughts and our beliefs and our values and our consciousness. And we were wrong to think that we can solve our problems strictly on the other side of the coin…our systems, our government, our laws, our economic systems, our individual and collective behaviors. We were wrong in not realizing that we have to address both sides of the coin, at the same time. These two sides—interior and exteriors—need to tetra-evolve 6—meaning they both affect each other and both evolve at the same time. So we desperately need to change our worldviews and our systems at the same time.
We need to be radically wrong about where we are today, to release our beliefs, and our certainty, and our attachment to our current worldviews and our systems and what we think is “The Truth”. We need to consider that our existing paradigms, in regards to economics, to politics, to education, to everything, might be wrong. And in a paradoxical way, we will find the rightness, the truth, and the liberation, and the beauty of a whole new way of being and thriving.
But do not fear, be very, very excited. In acknowledging this wrongness, we find ourselves open to a whole new paradigm that just might be able to liberate humanity—a resource based economy 7.
Q. Zack, I don’t know what a resource based economy is, but I’m willing to risk being wrong enough to check it out. Thank you.
Z. Okay man. Off I go in search of my next meal and a new cardboard box to sleep in.
____________
1. Being Wrong, by Kathryn Schulz, in an RSA EVent presentation
2. “People Are Allergic to the Facts”
As Kahan put it in a recent editorial in the journal Nature “In other words, scientists need to do some radical reframing if they hope to get through to people whose world view is threatened by their results. While there’s no guarantee that effort will succeed, Kahan and his colleagues convincingly argue that the effort is “critical to enlightened democratic policymaking.” Otherwise, our gut instincts will remain the experts we rely upon the most.
3. “Facts Don’t Matter”: The Boston Globe
4. Born to Believe, by Dr. Andrew Newberg
5. “Re-writing the Story of Who We Are”, Lisa Reagan
6. “The whole point of a quadratic approach is that all four dimensions arise simultaneously: they tetra-enact each other and tetra-evolve together.” Ken Wilber
7. The Zeitgeist Movement; The Venus Project
When I fail I learn something. When I succeed I learn nothing.
ReplyDeleteThis is awesome
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the "Being Wrong" presentation. (Make sure you watch the Ken Robinson animation that is linked on the same page.)
ReplyDeleteReminded me of my favorite Zen Maxim/Proverb:
"Where there is great doubt, there will be great awakening; small doubt, small awakening, no doubt, no awakening."
At least I believe it to be a Zen Maxim... My second favorite Zen Maxim is:
"The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both."
However, yesterday, in some further research, I discovered that it was apparently something that was penned by a Unitarian and appeared in a book published in 1932.
This caused me to reflect on my favorite Zen Maxim.