The Truth About Belief

Let’s keep it 100%…

Belief is only good for one thing, and that is ‘giving you confidence.’

At both the personal and group level, there are two facets of confidence that belief can improve, and those are 1) encouraging risk, and 2) encouraging effort.

When you believe in yourself, it means you’re willing to take risks that people who don’t believe in themselves probably won’t take. When you believe in yourself, you persevere and often times prevail through trial, discomfort and adversity because you expect your efforts to always rise to the occasion.

When you believe in your group (team, culture, faith system, whatever), it means you’re willing to risk everything on the notion that your group is generally headed in the right direction, and subsequently, you become willing to invest effort towards elevating and defending the status and value of the group.

The main problem with belief though is that, paradoxically, while it does tend to give people confidence, confidence generally mutates into assuredness, and then certainty… Certainty becomes absolutism; absolutism becomes authority, and authority becomes status belief — a view of inherent or earned superiority.

You see, the more you practice believing things is the more you develop an outlook of authority. The more you develop an outlook of authority is the more limited, rigid and constricted your thinking becomes.

I’ll let you in on a little secret though…

You don’t actually have to believe things.

You can actually consider, weigh and give value to information, ideas, experiences and expressions in real time.

You can actually rely on function and capability, without ever having to access those things through ‘confidence’.

In fact, more often than not, confidence is actually a deterrent to true capability.

If you can’t do things without believing in yourself first, then your capability and potency as an individual is necessarily limited by and to your self esteem.

Belief is an unnecessary step in the intellectual process.

Why believe things when you can simply observe, adapt, reason, put effort towards, organize and process, be honest about, and move in theme with reality and new experiences in real time?

I don’t have to turn reality into an ideal before I can interact with it.

That’s basically what belief both is and does… It turns facets of reality into idealisms so that weaker minds can consume and process them. Belief is turning facets of reality into intellectual artifacts that the ego can use towards establishing or achieving confidence, while working from within the perceptive outlook.