The truth is, most people don’t know what they really believe.

For one thing, most people have never had their beliefs truly tested. They know what they think they believe, but unless said beliefs are brought to bear on a direct, real life experience, we have no idea how we truly feel… how we would really react.

For another thing, a lot of people adopt beliefs not as true deep down convictions, but as part of their social camouflage. They know what answers are required for them to fit in with their social group, and use those beliefs to guide their social actions. They know what they want to be seen to believe.

There is also the identity aspect of professed belief. People adopt the beliefs that match the kind of person they want to be, or the kind of person they think they are. As long as said beliefs remain untested, there is no conflict. Someone can go on thinking that gays shouldn’t be able to marry or that all races are equal for many years, but then one of their children comes out of the closet or a black family moves in next door, and they find out what they really believe.

Also, most people are too busy dealing with life to really reflect on what they truly believe. Modern life keeps us busy. That’s what it’s supposed to do. And being that busy keeps us off the philosopher’s road most of the time. We simply don’t have the time, energy, or desire to think really deeply about things. The philosopher’s road is a rough and dangerous place. It’s far better to just get on with life and not worry about the big things.

That’s why philosophy requires solitude. You need time where your mind can be clear enough to delve deep into complex and difficult thoughts. This is why philosophers become loners, and loners become philosophers.

Now obviously, I am not talking about the simple beliefs about how the world works that we use all the time. We’re not talking about beliefs about how to drive a car, what makes for a good lunch, or how to give a presentation. We are not talking about beliefs as to how doors work or a belief in the practical applications of gravity.

No, we are talking the deep stuff, like how criminals should be treated or what should be done about world hunger or what kind of a person people should strive to be.

That leads us to the arena where our beliefs come into contact with practical reality : politics. Despite how it seems a lot of the time, politics is where the marketplace of ideas interfaces with the way our various levels of government are actually led.

Due to the highly indirect nature of representative democracy, the interface is weak and unreliable at best. A lot of other factors cloud the picture. But, amazingly enough, and despite all the odds, our governments do end up more or less representing the will of the people sooner or later.

Which brings us back to what people truly believe. We must ask the question : how many people vote their true beliefs, versus how many vote their social camouflage or idea of themselves?

I think, in modern democracies, we have ways of convincing ourselves either that our beliefs do matter (say, on an Internet forum) or that they do not (say, in election season). Lost in the shuffle is the true power of the marketplace of ideas. History clearly shows us that public opinion about subjects changes in very large ways over time, and it is rare that we stop and think about exactly how this happens.

Clearly, sometimes, people arguing with each other over politics actually has an effect. Certain positions gain power over time via people knowing how to overcome others rhetorically. In general, the more socially advanced, tolerant opinions overcome the more narrow and prejudiced ones in modern democracies because out societies are based on tolerance and understanding, at least in the “live and let live” “mind your own business” sense. This can only happen if, over time, some people start winning arguments while others lose.

The true sign that one side is winning, then, becomes the other side’s unwillingness to engage. When one side knows, even if only on a subconscious level, that their positions are no longer rhetorically supportable, they become understandably reluctant to enter the arena. They know they will lose every single time.

So while it is easy to tell oneself that political arguments never solve anything, nobody ever changes their minds, and even if they do, they will never ever admit they lost, so what’s the point? And it’s true in the small scale. Our reptile brains cause us to seek to dominate others with our arguments, and that means forcing them to submit to us and cry uncle.

But verbal arguments lack the kind of force to make that really happen. It’s clearly possible, but extraordinarily unlikely. No argument is so perfect that it can actually make someone admit they were wrong, and to think so is to assume that everyone is intellectually honest, and to be honest, they aren’t.

This lack of clear victory makes it seem like the arguments are futile to our reptile minds. But opinions clearly change over time and argument is the only plausible mechanism for that. Somehow, these seemingly pointless arguments, at least some of the time, actually have a point.

And seeing as these arguments are based on personal belief, and we know that the people of today have reached consensus on things that were extremely contentious in the past, what people actually believe in the future is really on the line at all times.

It’s hard to tell what contribution we make ourselves because the effect is cumulative. It is meaningless to ask which rock is truly the avalanche. All we can do is apply what force we can, and hope our side wins.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have been thinking about people’s ability to, in a strictly mental sense, create what they need in order to compensate for a lack of an expected stimulus a lot lately.

Sorry that’s such a complicated sentence. It’s the best I could do.

The example I talked about yesterday was the way a blind person’s other four senses heighten in response to the lack of visual input. Whether born blind or blinded, the human brain will compensate for the lack of expected stimulus because it has to. The human mind simply cannot accept a lack of expected stimulus.

This is easiest to see in sensory deprivation experiments. When the stimulus level is that catastrophically low, the mind’s react to this stimulus starvation is to generate vivid hallucinations which can include all five sense. That is how powerful the mind’s need for stimulation can get, and shows that the human mind can, in certain situations, generate the stimulus it lacks.

That’s easy to see with sensory stimuli. But I think it works for emotional stimuli as well. I think that in a healthy mind, when a necessary emotional stimulus is absent, the mind creates a version of that stimulation, a sort of placeholder image version of it, until the real thing can be found.

This pale imitation cannot compete with the real thing. It is merely a ghost, a shadow of the real thing. It merely acts as the minimum stimulation level to prevent catastrophic emotional collapse.

The unhealthy mind, by comparison, cannot do this, and it is a strict rationalist sense of only believing that which is “real” that prevents it. When the mind is rendered incapable of fooling itself even a little, it becomes extremely vulnerable to the breakdowns and malfunctions (and even delusions) of a stimulation-starved mind.

Thus, a rigid rationalism with no room for belief for its own sake actually sabotages the ability of the mind to cope.

This psychological self-righting mechanism, in most healthy people, takes the form of religion. A belief in an all-powerful loving God allows the individual to generate the feelings of love, acceptance, belonging, and so on in order to continue to function and keep going even if life fails to provide those stimuli itself.

However, everyone’s emotional gaps are different, and if religion comes into existence in order to fill those gaps, religion must different from person to person too. We cannot all have the exact same God. One key cannot fit all locks.

For those of us without religion, or at least without religious belief, the outlook for psychological health is bleaker. We cannot generate our own cure the way someone with some kind of all-encompassing belief system can. Our gaps, left to themselves, would remain unfilled, and so another solution must be found.

Thus, we turn to the wide range of alternatives offered by modern society. None of them have the panacea effect of religious belief, so they are usually high maintenance solutions that do not so much solve the problem as mask it.

They distract, they sedate, they suppress, and they substitute, but they can never do the job for long.

For a lot of people, career is their religion and ambition is their interface with it. You can fill those gaps in your emotional inputs with the hope that the next promotion, the next big deal, or the next fiscal year will be just the thing for them.

And even if the last string of successes failed to do it, the need is so strong that it is easy to convince ourselves that is is the next whatever that will do it.

Otherwise…. what’s the fucking point?

Really, this need to fill the voids within us drives all our modern addictions. In our daily spiritual crisis, stripped of the ability to imagine our way healthy, we follow the destructive path of decadence : we try to fulfill our emotional needs via hopelessly indirect and short term solutions like food, drugs, ambition, acquisition, or even rage.

As modern spirituality/psychology teaches, this search for external solutions to our lack of all the complex emotional stimuli we need is ultimately futile. No solution outside ourselves can ever become permanent. It will always be doomed to eventual failure. The only possible permanent solutions have to come from within. Somehow, in this rational age, you have to give yourself permission to fill these gaps in order to function.

This is how the refusal to allow or accept any belief that is not externally verifiable leaves people psychologically vulnerable to anything from depression to addiction to being victimized by those who seem to offer easy solutions. Under that system, there is no way for the mind to compensate for lack of love, friendship, social acceptance, or whatever.

We starve inside because we refuse to generate our own sustenance. Better to starve than to eat illusory food?

I used to think so, but now I am not so sure.

The problem, of course, is that there is no path back from the rationalist route. I cannot see a way for a rationalist mind to consciously accept that which is not “real”, regardless of how dire the emotional need might be. Before this rigid rationalism sets in, the mind might still have the necessary “wiggle room” to at least fool itself a little in the background, letting the conscious mind continue to think it is perfectly rational while the rest of the mind keeps things balanced with the kind of unobtrusive delusions that are easy to conceal and rarely face scrutiny from the outside world.

But if the rigid rationalism sets in and the conscious mind insists on stripping out everything inside itself that is not “true”, then this vital coping mechanism will be destroyed and the only way to cope is to find the necessary inputs in their genuine form, accepting no substitutes.

And how do you get there when you are starving inside?

So go right ahead and love yourself, without condition and without proof. Only this will provide the permission to fill one’s emotional needs oneself. Not entirely… you will still want all those needs met by the world as well.

But it will let you get by until you do.

I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.