(Des)Belief
This is a tale about a human being and their possessions.
No sad beginning is known, and neither is a happy ending.
That person is just there, breathing and living with all of their possessions they can never get rid of -the things inside their head.
:)
If you visit an optometrist, you will get your eyes checked and might get a prescription for a new pair of glasses. Those pieces of glass surrounded by -usually- plastic will help you to see the world better. You should instantaneously get more focus, better definition, and less light glare (although I guarantee Christmas is so much more magical when all the lights around you seem like stars).
But besides those physical lenses, the human vision is modified by layers -and layers, and layers, and layers…- of psychological lenses. Each tiny bit of knowledge, past experiences, and chemical unbalance in our brains will impair how we see the world. For good or for bad.
Sometimes, if things are in the right place inside our head, we will observe things in a better way even when the whole world is collapsing around us. This doesn’t mean we will make better decisions, though. But this is not what I’m writing about. Different people will see the same fact and have different opinions because of all those lenses one will have but not the other.
With absolutely no scientific evidence, I believe that one of the major lenses people will wear is the set of beliefs they possess -I BELIEVE people are naturally bad, or I BELIEVE summer is better than winter, or I BELIEVE plastic arts are more noble than music. And, as we see things from the specific “I believe” place, our decisions and actions will usually follow that. The brilliant Hans Rosling (one of my favourite people I’ll never meet) pointed out how we can be wrong about many things we believe during this TED lecture.
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And that’s why beliefs can be so dangerous.
Those beliefs will come from anywhere: your friends, family, religion, society around you, your own thoughts… Many times, we don’t even realize we’re interpreting facts or acting just because what we believe in is leading us toward that.
People believe the earth is flat, and science and ALL of the major media outlets are lying to us (and, of course, NASA and your secondary teachers). This can be dangerous. Now, I believe everyone is trying to hide things and lying to us, and the slippery slope that leads them to believe that vaccines do not work, 5G networks are increasing the number of people within the autistic spectrum, Earth is flat, and gravity does not exist is mostly real.
From there, things go on, and during times of crisis, their perception of reality is so impaired they will go through some terrible paths. During the COVID-19 pandemic, of course, those people would question what the “big media” and scientists were publishing (because they’re lying to us) and follow that one ““““scientist”””” that goes against the herd. Denying vaccination and pursuing treatment with Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin might’ve been the cause of death of many people around the world.
Additionally, beliefs can lead one to exclude and/or harm other groups. Slavery and the holocaust are in the history books to teach us those lessons, but not everyone is paying attention to them.
Science is not the opposite of belief, nor is it the truth. Science is the pursuit of the truth, which might go against one’s -or many’s- belief. Along the road, science might not be true all of the time, but as hypotheses, experiments, and theories are created, the closer we are to reaching it. Because of beliefs (and where they come from), people heavily misinterpret science’s role in society and its contributions, including the meaning of hypothesis or theory.
Beliefs are not inherently bad, though. They are part of what makes our brains work the way they work and can help us to function better. But an exercise that’s extremely healthy is to bring those beliefs from the unconscious areas of your brain and analyze them. As I wrote here, changes happen, and people change (as they should), and I will always prefer to BELIEVE in what won’t exclude or harm others. But that might be another one of my beliefs with no scientific support, and people just prefer to keep using the lens that will make the Christmas lights look like tiny stars in your living room.
As one of the most important Brazilians to ever live once said, “There is no impartiality, everyone is guided by an ideological basis. The question is: is its ideological basis inclusive or exclusionary?”
(Long live Paulo Freire)
Take care.
