What To Believe?
Does anyone else out there struggle to figure out what to believe? It isn’t always easy. We’re free to choose from so much. There seem to be endless arrays of people and organizations competing to coax us into believing one thing or another. Maybe someone comes to your door, attempting to convert you to a particular set of religious beliefs. Or, maybe it is a pharmaceutical company and an advertising agency that concocted a commercial to convince you to believe that your life would be much better with their pill. Or, maybe it is someone trying to convince you to believe that an election was stolen. Sometimes it is just as hard to figure out who to believe as it is what to believe.
And then, we live in a time of such incredible information overload. We are bombarded all day from every angle with information, studies, investigations, articles, podcasts, TV shows, commercials, books, radio shows, and all the crazy stuff on the internet. Ads literally pop out at you. It can be hard to make sense of it all. How are we supposed to know what to believe?
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Toward the end of my days as a wannabe philosopher, I became interested in American Pragmatism. After reading some William James, I came away with what I think of as the Pragmatist Razor. William James formulated it kind of like this:
What are the practical differences between believing in theory/idea A versus believing in theory/idea B?
I found that to be a valuable way to frame up how to decide what to believe in a lot of cases. What difference will it make in our lives to believe A over B or vice-versa? Or to choose between multiple competing theories or ideas?
Obviously, the way we arrive at our beliefs is not always simple, rational, or even conscious much of the time. A lot of our beliefs are received through our cultural upbringing. They are part of the ether in which we come of age. We are bombarded with messages that direct us to accept certain sets of beliefs, as if they are not beliefs, but just the way things are. We often cannot explain why we hold many of our beliefs. Well, maybe we think we can, but when we actually try to explain them, we fail miserably.
Some of our beliefs are so deep-rooted, we don’t even notice them as beliefs. They are the framework through which we see reality, our deepest assumptions that we don’t even recognize as assumptions or can’t possibly fathom that things may be different than they seem.
What can we do about those beliefs? Can we interrogate them? Possibly. Can we rethink them? Possibly. That may require some heavy lifting, maybe some pain, maybe conflict.
As discussed elsewhere, life is full of complexity and interdependence. It is hard to know what to believe when it comes to situations where we consciously choose what to believe. Maybe the Pragmatist Razor can help. Can we ask ourselves what the practical differences in our lives may be for believing one idea over another? Can we ask ourselves how the world would be different if most people believed in a certain idea versus another? What if eradicating things like poverty or racism just came down to what we believe about those things? Can our beliefs change the world? Do our beliefs have practical consequences?