Fundamental beliefs

Like most people, I have been part of many discussions over completely different topics. Normally, speaker A states a position, and B disagrees. Then there is an exchange about which reasons are good and which are not (this is if the conversation does not devolve into an exchange of whataboutism or ad hominem attacks). Speaker A ends with the same position he started with, and the same goes for B. Nothing has changed. From the same observations, people conclude completely different things. However, the interesting thing is this: if we discuss 10 issues that can have a yes or no answer, the number of possible positions is 1024. Yet, in practice, we will see that most people end up answering those 10 questions in a very similar way, resulting in at most 2 or 3 independent positions.

Many people have noticed this before and multiple explanations have been offered. In my case, I like to talk about fundamental beliefs. These are beliefs that are at the very core of what a person believes about the world. And there are very few of them: for that reason, different people will respond similarly to many possible issues and end up in one of the big ideological clusters.

We have many beliefs that are not fundamental and they are all part of a big intricate network. Some of these beliefs are not very central to the network and they can be easily replaced. For example, if I think the name of the neighbor (who I have barely seen) is Tom and then someone corrects me and says it is John, I have absolutely no problem updating my network.

However, some beliefs are very deep in the network, connected to many other beliefs. For instance, if you were trying to convince me that slavery is desirable, I would have a negative reaction because it connects directly with very core fundamental beliefs about what is morally acceptable and what is not. Those are central nodes in the network: a change in them will reverberate through other beliefs and could trigger (maybe not overnight) a cascade of updating in which the worldview of a person changes substantially.

What are those fundamental beliefs that completely condition our vision of the world? This is a tentative list, made mostly from personal experience, discussion with friends, and inspiration from some relevant books.

• Trust: We can trust authorities / We must be skeptical of authorities.

• Complexity: Complexity emerges only from agency / Complexity might arise from decentralized processes.

• Human malleability: Humans can be fundamentally changed through culture and education / There is something called human nature.

• Limited world: Most games are zero-sum games / Not all games are zero-sum games.

• Reason: Reason is an objective tool we can use to find the Truth / Reason is limited; the world is complex and often has no objective solution.

• Moral Agent: The moral agent is the individual / The moral agent is a collection of individuals (the nation, the family).

• Violence: The end justifies the means / The end does not justify the means.

• Fairness: Outcomes are more important than processes / Processes are more important than outcomes.

• Supernatural: The world is not supernatural / The world is supernatural.

The above list with its 9 points is most likely redundant, which means they are most likely correlated with an even more fundamental question. For instance: I think people that believe in Capital-R Reason are much more prone to agree with solutions in which the end justifies the means. These people also tend to believe that humans are malleable, that complexity emerges from agency, and that we need to just trust authorities (the correct ones) to have a perfect society. Maybe these points could be summarized into a single fundamental belief called “bottom-up” vs “top-down”.

I am aware that these fundamental beliefs are not as binary as I represented them. People who do not think that the end justifies the means would still agree if pressed that if the only way to stop a guy about to press a button that destroys the entire planet is to kill the guy, then this is the right thing to do. People who believe that economics is not zero-sum might accept that some very specific resources do still fall into the limited category. People who think that humans are essentially malleable might think that genetics still plays a role (even if small) in determining human performance. It is all about degrees.

Over my lifetime I have seen myself changing many of my beliefs quite radically, and every time it happened it did not come from reading about the topic itself but from how these fundamental questions are answered.

For example: when I was 16 my biology teacher introduced me to the ideas of the Club of Rome, a think tank very influential in the 60s, that sounded the alarm about overpopulation being one of the major threats that humankind was facing. To me at the time, these ideas made sense. The more people inhabit the planet, the more natural resources we are consuming and the more the planet suffers. What is the obvious solution? Controlling the population increase! If the planet had (e.g.) 10% of the number of people, everyone would become much richer since there would be much more to distribute per head. Not only that, the smaller number of humans would make the protection and preservation of nature much easier.

I carried these ideas with me for the longest time. I would like to add, for an embarrassingly long amount of time. I had already read enough economics to know that the above arguments do not make much sense and that is simply not how things work, but still for some reason I did not consciously update quickly enough. I eventually did. And it was not so much from reading about this specific topic (overpopulation), but the change came mostly from understanding that economics is not a zero-sum game and that wealth does not come from splitting the current resources. Before that, I am sure I could find very good arguments for why the Club of Rome is correct, because there are good arguments. For any position you can find good reasons and good arguments; that is what humans are made for.

Another example. For another embarrassingly long amount of time, I believed that decentralization in general was a disastrous thing. I clearly remember complaining about the education system in my home country (Spain) and the fact that in the 17 regions there were slightly different versions of how to do things. I found that annoying because I thought: “If there is one correct way of doing things, why would you have to create variants?” I found it especially upsetting that different regions had different grading systems, making comparisons between regions and standardization more difficult.

Now I think that my previous position is just wrong. What changed was not that someone explained to me how well the system in Navarra or Catalonia was working (I would have just pointed out that in that case the solution is to have “that” system in the whole country). What changed was a fundamental belief I held about the power of reason to design good systems. Over time I understood that society is not a machine that an engineer has to design. And now, since I do not believe that anything like the perfect education system exists, I rather value a system where decentralization allows for the creation and exploration of new alternatives. We shouldn’t aim for one perfect design, but allow different methods to compete so the best solutions can emerge. If anything, now I tend to think that there is absolutely NO decentralization in the education system!

All these fundamental beliefs condition our vision of the world. Thomas Sowell spoke about the constrained and unconstrained vision. Jonathan Haidt about the moral flavors. I think these are good explanations. I just don’t think that anyone has got the “final set” yet (clearly I haven’t found it) but understanding that it exists clarifies why Speaker A and Speaker B never agree. They are arguing about the leaves of the tree, while the disagreement is actually in the roots.