Belief (Aged 21)

This is the turning point.

Belief, World-wide religion, the nature of the self: a contemplative epiphany

Belief is the basis of logic.  There is no way that an individual can be completely removed from society and remain sane.   Society (be it national, global, local, et al.) runs on religion.

Now for the logic behind those statements.

First, a bit of a story, and thus context.  Upon leaving Wooster, I intended to see a psychiatrist, really and truly I did.  But waiting lists spanning from March until August put an end to that.  So, five months and some interesting scars later, I see the psychiatrist and then the recommended-by-the-psychiatrist psychologist.  (I think that it is fantastic that Latin could make the previous adjectival phrase into one world.)  This epiphany arises from a conversation with her. (Le Gasp!  Unclear antecedent?)

It starts with a conversation and a technique about changing harmful emotions.  This sounded false to me when I first heard it.  Isn't that willingly distorting the truth? I thought.  Isn't that a form of a lie?  But think briefly, as she and I did, on what makes an emotion.  An event triggers it, a chain of thought fires through the brain, and then boom! an emotion.   The event itself doesn't create the emotion, or else how could people have different reactions to the same thing?  Just look around the audience in a movie theater screening a bawdy comedy to see evidence that the same stimuli affect individuals differently.  The chain of thought supplied by the individual's own mind/brain leads to the emotion.  Now to the issue of lying.  The emotion comes about through a process, a string of thoughts threaded together by the mind.  To change the result without changing the process would be a superficial change only, and also a lie: it would be dishonest to the mind and thought process which produced it.  But if one changes the process, then it is only natural that the outcome as well must change.  A different string of thoughts following an event will lead to a different emotional reaction.  The question with emotions is what was the process?  Thought processes produce emotions so quickly that the process itself becomes elided between the stimulus and the result.  The technique we were working on related to acknowledging the original thought process, then putting it to the test.

Remember that the same brain one uses to create emotions also produces improbable dreams, hallucinations, misunderstandings, that it looses or forgets memories, sometimes even making up its own events.  The brain is not infallible.  Assuming that it is leaves one with only the first emotion, and no logical way out of it.  I think that it must be a philosophical fallacy to declare, "My brain told me so, so it must be true."

Let me share the example that she and I used in our conversation.  She takes out a sheet of paper, and on the top of the page writes out the following situation: "You didn't get a card from your best friend on your birthday."  Then at the bottom of the page, I provide the emotion that first comes to mind: hurt.  Sounds reasonable enough doesn't it?  Noting crazy or ground breaking so far.

With the stimulus and the outcome thus listed,  I am left to fill in the thought process in between the two.  "Well, the first thought I'd have if my best friend didn't send a card would be that she forgot."  Why did she forget?  "I guess that she had more important things to do."  What does that mean?  "It means that I'm not important enough to her."  So what?  How does her opinion relate to the emotion "hurt"?   "It means that I'm not important enough in general.  It hurts because that's being brought up by someone I trusted."  Wow.  Now isn't that a pretty solemn thought process over a single card, connecting a single emotion to an isolated event?

Now to test the assumptions that the brain made.
1.  She forgot.  In this scenario, is there concrete evidence that she actually forgot?  There isn't a card, sure, but couldn't it be lost in the mail, she's going to deliver it when she comes to visit, she's planning something else for a celebration?  The brain's assumption isn't the only option in reality.

2.  She was doing something more important.  Hello, brain, disconnect your self-centered button for a moment.  Isn't it probable that she hasn't been sitting up at nights for the past year preparing to mail the card so that it arrives in the early mail on your birthday?  She has other things in her life as well.  Think how wrong and guilty you'd feel if you found out later that the reason you didn't get her card was because she was being chased by a Siberian tiger in the Amazon (or insert some other, more probable extenuating circumstance).

3.  I'm not important to her.  Oh, really?  Then why is she your best friend?  You've both traded affections back and forth, spent time for each other, demonstrated to each other multiple times over the past that you are important to each other.  One incident, not even substantiated, surely cannot convert best-friend status into one-who-thinks-you-are-scum.

4.  I'm not important.  Tell that to the rest of the people you interact with, brain.  You do this, that, and those things too.  You fill places that others didn't know were empty before.  You serve a vital role.  A birthday card will not change that.

So in that manner, the process which had created hurt feelings was proven unrealistic.  All through logic.

But assumption 4's rebuttal again assumes something: that you have a role.  Since I left Wooster, I've felt like I haven't had one of those.  So I had to ask: "What makes someone important, what makes them have a role at all?"

She looked at me piercingly through her glasses.  "Being human.  Having shared the same experiences as those around you.  We are all important for the sake of that.  Haven't you seen that before?  It's not what we can do, or what we have done that gives us that importance.  Is a child any less important than an adult?  Is a disabled person any less important than a hale one?"

Now where is the logic in that statement?  I think that it is true.  Or more aptly, I believe that it is true.  I know that I judge life important, regardless of what form it comes in.  I know that our laws, both civic and sacred defend that principle vehemently.  I know the statement to be true, but I don't know why it's true.  There isn't a string of logic for me to follow.  It's just something that one must believe. I asked her about that.  "So, does this mean that I just have to believe for it to make sense?  That there's no way around believing?"  She thought.  Then, "Yes."

I know that that was only one example.  One example a world truth does not make.  So I anyone to find an example that'll prove me wrong.  Go forth meditating on Obi-Won Kenobi's advice to Luke in The Return of the Jedi "You'll find all the truths we cling to are true, from a certain point of view."

Now I come to a splitting point.  I have presented what lead me to the belief that believing is at the root of everything.  From here, I intend to substantiate to disparate statements on two different matters: how this revelation applies to me as an individual, and how it reinvents society as a whole.  I don't have an elegant way of segueing between the two, so blunt and evident will just have to do.  Between these two substantiations I will elucidate the latter two statements of my opening paragraph (either directly or in-).

As per myself:  I had been attempting to strip myself of all beliefs, considering them to be a social construct, and thus something that inhibited my true self.  For too long, I have tried to live some semblance of a model life.  I wanted to fulfill my parents' dreams and expectations.  I even made up expectations to fill.   My time went to achieving things deemed worthy within that constructed world.  I'd choose not to do things because they didn't line up with the model image I wanted, and conversely, I'd chose to do things that I didn't care about because they did align.  The model persona . . . did . . . I don't know what.  And it really doesn't matter at this moment.  What matters is that I traced my depression, my suicidal thoughts, my feelings of alienation and isolation, to the persona which I used as a buffer between myself and the world.  So since I've been home, I've been attempting to strip myself of every societal expectation, excepting only the ones which pass my inspection.  As I said before, this included beliefs.  I'd analyze my reactions to events, and compile them to make an image of myself.  I didn't question them.  I accepted what my brain and gut produced without question.  I actually came to value this new identity for its independence.  Except it had no basis in reality, or logic.  I was touting myself as a bag of brain barf.  Put that way, no wonder it didn't work.  So here I am.  Looking to put belief back into my world, searching for the ability to trust and believe without the safety net of reason.  How am I doing?  Who knows.  Certainly not me.  Future-me knows, but I've never met her, and I doubt she'd tell anyways.  ANYWAYS, on to more fun things, such as the effect of belief on society.  Yeah!

All right, recapping the important points.  Logic depends on belief.  Actually, that's the main point.  Okay, with that said, we're good to go.

If logic depends on belief, then there can not be logic without belief.  So, law cases, laws, atheist arguments, politics, all these things require a basic belief in order to function.  In American civil law, as American government specifically declared a division between church and state, look for the beliefs.  All men are created equal.  (I believe that all men are inherently equal would be the belief translation)  All individuals deserve the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  (I believe that all individuals have the right to freely pursue the best life they can within certain parameters)  Laws demanding the punishment for certain crimes, even the designation of crime, indicate beliefs.  I believe that life ought not be taken except in self-defense.  I believe that an individual has a right to their own sexual integrity.  I believe that private citizens have a right to their privacy.  I believe that governments must defend and protect their people as well as themselves.  Courts are arguing about the wording and the extent of these beliefs in court, but they are accepted as valid, and taken for granted when our legislatures and judges consider laws.  Laws are built on systems of shared belief.  That's how I state that governments run on religion.

When I use the word "religion", I don't mean the dogma, the rituals, or the systems associated with individual religions.  "Religion" originates from the Latin word "religo", meaning "I bind together".  Since no rope or prison cell or other concrete object is large enough to bind an entire culture together, I need use the abstract.  So I use religion to mean "a shared system of beliefs which binds a group of people together".  In agreeing to the laws of our community, and agreeing to follow them, we have accepted the basic assumptions and beliefs behind those rules.  We have all joined a religion, and our law books, creeds, oaths are our sacred texts.  But then who or what is the god, the deity? I am smiling now, knowing that I have my own belief, but that I will only write the following question: what is it that humans have that leads us to believe in the inherent worth of each others' lives?

I welcome insight.  Come!  Share in the mental lightening of your own epiphany!  It makes a great fire.  I'll bring the marshmallows, and we can have a metaphysical camp-out.  See you 'round the fire.