Be Very Careful When You Know You're "Right."
My Dad used to volunteer in the local Bingo Hall to raise money for his football team. He told me a story once about a cantankerous old woman who came in to play every week.
Most gamblers are superstitious, but this woman was on a whole ‘nother level. She believed that her “pickles” (little lottery card things) should be drawn only from the top right corner of the box.
She would not let my Dad select them since it required a “woman’s touch.” On days when there were only men in the booth, my Dad would have to go find a random woman to satisfy her.
Then she would go sit in the exact same seat (she got there early to claim it each week, and Lord help anyone who sat in it before she got there). Win or lose, she would go on to repeat the same routine week in, week out.
Our cultural ethos tells us that our beliefs “deserve respect.”
It’s so funny to me that this woman can go to the bingo hall every weekend, go through this inane routine, and we laugh at her superstitions, but the second she enters a place of worship or goes on a political rant, her beliefs deserve respect.
I don’t think so. It’s time for a new narrative.
Rather than saying “respect my beliefs” what if we started saying: “As a human being, I have the ability to create beliefs out of thin air, and the outside world can cause me to be superstitious pretty easily, so I should probably be careful what I believe?”
(Not that this will ever catch on, considering that 95% of people claim to be self aware but only 10-15% actually are)
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”
-Kurt Vonnegut.
Humans deserve respect.
Our beliefs do not. We can make up beliefs out of thin air! Our beliefs need to be questioned and stress-tested, lest we end up like Adolf Hitler.
You heard me right. Before he became Capital-H Hitler, the 20th century’s top supervillain was an angry 34-year-old who went to prison for leading a failed Bavarian coup in 1924.
After his imprisonment, he would say that his time in Landsberg was his “university sponsored by the state.” He read widely, taking a deep dive into the classics of history. But he did not read to learn or to challenge himself.
He read to pad his own biases and inflate his already overfull ego. After all of that reading, he said (years later) “I recognized the correctness of my views.”
Alex Hormozi has a beautiful definition of the word “Intelligence.”
“I define ‘intelligence’ as the speed of learning. I define ‘learning’ as: ‘same condition, different behavior.’ If I hold up a red card, and then I slap you, and then I hold it up and slap you again, how many times can I slap you until until you duck? The intelligent person learns to duck quickly.”
If you meet the same condition again and again and don’t change your behavior, then you have learned nothing.”
-Alex Hormozi.
If you go to prison, read a ton, and then go on to perpetrate violence on an even larger scale? You have learned nothing. You just know things.
Knowledge is not power. Knowledge+positive action=power.
How many of us consume information this way?
We decide what we believe and then go looking for data to support it.
Most of us are guilty of it! We Find articles and videos we agree with, made by people we agree with, that we share with an echo chamber of people we already agree with?
Never challenging ourselves, never questioning our deeply held beliefs.
We all know what happened after Hitler was released. He went on to terrorize the world. He was directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent human beings.
When it was time for reckoning, he poisoned his dog and shot himself in the head in a concrete bunker rather than face justice.
How different could his life have been if he’d been willing to challenge his beliefs? His story could have been one of redemption instead of tyranny.
What if he’d read in prison, realized that he was carrying horrible biases, and changed his ways?
Obviously, Adolf Hitler is an extreme example of what happens when the certainty that you’re right meets massive amounts of power.
Most of us will probably never wield that level of power, but we will probably live with the certainty that we’re right without questioning ourselves or seeking self-awareness, which will cause us to misuse the power that we do have in our day-to-day lives.
One of Webster’s definitions of the word ‘tyrant’ is:
“One resembling an oppressive ruler in the harsh use of authority or power.”
Domestic abusers are tyrants. Bad bosses or managers are tyrants. People who cannot let go of their egotistical beliefs become tyrants.
Let’s look at a good example of someone who served prison time and reformed. When he went to prison, Malcolm X was named Malcolm Little. By his own admission, he was a violent criminal, sentenced to 8 to 10 years for larceny.
His rage consumed him in his first year, and he spent a lot of time in solitary for violent offenses. He ranted so loudly against God in his cell that the guards nicknamed him ‘Satan.’ And so it went until his sister got him transferred to a different prison, and he started reading.
Though Malcolm’s reading was more targeted, he read many of the same philosophical classics as Hitler. Yet his experience could not have been more different.
He learned. There’s a quote in his autobiography from the day X read the biblical story of Paul’s conversion in the prison library:
“I have since learned — helping me to understand what then began to happen within me — that the truth can be quickly received, or received at all, only by the sinner who knows and admits that he is guilty of having sinned much. Stated another way: only guilt admitted accepts truth. The Bible: the one people whom Jesus could not help were the Pharisees, they didn’t feel they needed any help.”
Two men go to prison and spend most of their time reading. One reads and says “I recognized the correctness of my views.” He goes on to commit genocide, suicide, and have his name become synonymous with evil itself.
The other reads and says “only guilt admitted accepts truth.” He goes on to become one of the greatest civil rights forces of the 21st century.
To look at the sum of human knowledge and come away thinking that whatever you already happen to believe in your dusty corner of the world is 100% correct? That’s insanity.
Do you want to be the revolutionary or the tyrant?
Brilliant article laddie!
Thank you, Aaron. This was an excellent read!