I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
– Bertrand Russell
Too often we become very sure of ourselves. So sure in fact, that we’re willing to do crazy things as a result of our firmly held beliefs. We lose life long friends for beliefs. We excommunicate family members for beliefs. We vote for leaders of nations because they pander to our beliefs. Too often those leaders send our men and women to war in order to protect and defend those beliefs.
The longer we tell ourselves our beliefs are the foundations of who we are, and that these beliefs are immutable, unquestionable facts of our reality, the harder it becomes to break free of the mindset and worldview we’ve built around ourselves inside of those beliefs. This is a dangerous way to operate. Once we’ve lost the ability to decouple our beliefs from who we see ourselves as fundamentally, those beliefs loose the malleability necessary to adapt to new information, insights, and perspectives. Then we become incorrigible, inveterate, and ultimately so deeply entrenched in our beliefs that they become able to be weaponized. Both by us, and against us.
We must maintain the ability to engage in discourse around our opinions. We need the discipline to actually demonstrate civility when discussing the merits of what we believe, not simply purport to be so. We need to recognize once again that our beliefs are personal, perspectival, and so very relative. We need to find the humility we seem to have lost that allows us to hold in our mind the idea that everything we’ve ever known might be false. At least at that point we’d be more willing to entertain the idea that somebody else might be right. And that no belief is worth dying (or killing) for.
