It’s glib. But it happens. A lot! Conversations deteriorate quickly based on this simple assumption:
“You just believe that because you want to.”
This is cut from the same cloth as the Courage Fallacy. It opines that others’ beliefs are easy, perhaps systematic but above all convenient. The truth is that we humans believe a bunch of things we’d rather not, and do not believe a bunch of things we probably wish we did.
There is no more confusing place to examine desire than when it comes to beliefs.
There is a mysterious division between what we think and what we want to think, and how we know the difference. Being that this is delicate and confusing internally, it is disastrous when it is reduced to simplistic accusations externally — for example, when preachers accuse each other of only preaching for what “itchy ears” want to hear (as per 2 Timothy 4:3).
Nearly every side of every issue could turn that into an indictment against the other, and there’d be a ring of truth to it. But how do we ever know that what we’re saying is not for itchy ears?
- Because it’s somehow harder to believe it?
- Because it just makes sense?
- Because it matches intuition?
- So we always trust our understanding?
It isn’t at all easy to parse this out.
Yet all too often, this is the level of discourse that exists between ideological camps right now:
Not only can I declare my speculation about your beliefs as fact, I can declare my speculations about how your arrived at those beliefs as fact.
Our world is full of this phenomenon, across the gamut of arbitrary aisles we’ve built for ourselves. In this we have yet another level of depth that the Golden Rule gives us. If we don’t want our beliefs sneeringly guessed at and dismissively gainsaid then, well, we probably shouldn’t do that to others.
We can’t change everyone’s minds, and we can’t fix terrible reasoning that abounds in our world. But each of us can make small differences among those close to us. Each of us can be a bastion of wonder, curiosity and peace.
We don’t get there by projecting what we think we know about each other.
We get there by asking.
And listening.
