How do people’s lives turn out the way they do? What motive forces are operating over the entire length of a life, determining what outcomes can result from the interplay between the individual and the environment? What a person believes underlies much. But belief has layers that need to be articulated: there is a different between believing in gravity, god(s), and a particular story, and these differences vary wildly between people. For some, God is dead and figuring out how gravity works is a life’s calling. For others, God is the motive force behind everything and weaving one’s individual story into the divine is all there is. The pursuit of love might be the top of the belief layer cake. The degree of earnestness identifies the extent to which a belief will be an over-riding theme, the lens through which one interprets and reacts to the inside and outside worlds. Do you believe that a coherent, remunerative career is valuable? You might be spending a lot of your energy achieving professional success. Perhaps you believe that harvesting and consuming animals is morally reprehensible; the way you cook and eat may be different from one who doesn’t belief as earnestly.
If earnest beliefs were static, people would look a lot more like characters in a television show. One episode in and you can predict the behavior of almost any character in almost any situation for the remainder of the show. It’s comforting to observe this kind of consistency, but it doesn’t reflect the long-term reality of human lives. Perhaps your conviction that having children would be unimaginable until you’ve been with your partner for three years and expanding a family starts to feel both possible and desirable. Maybe your commitment to the idea that a stable career is critical starts to fade away after a sixth miserable tax season at the accounting firm. These evolutionary changes are stimulated by experiences, outcomes, and the interpretations of both.
Earnest belief can be evaluated on the individual, group, and society level. Watch the way the Overton Window moves at the same time you try to evaluate your own beliefs, where they come from, and how you’ve enacted those beliefs. Developing a theory of belief through historical analysis is an excellent tool for self-understanding. Were abstractions compelling enough to drive your youthful decisions? Have you become more interested in your day-to-day experience or the lives of people nearby? Why? Asking and hypothesizing answers to these questions can help to proactively eliminate hysteresis: earnest beliefs that are outdated and vestigially enacted. Maybe money was critical pursuit in a deprived childhood, but has faded in importance in a fortunate later life; it might be time to re-evaluate the relationship with capital and its acquisition.
To accomplish an honest accounting of earnest beliefs, beliefs must be temporarily separated from identity. If “you’re the type of person who…” rather than being “someone who believes…”, it will be much more difficult to examine the possibility of releasing these “traits”. Beliefs make up who one is, but they have a second-order impact on one’s self-concept (whereas identity erasure might feel like self-erasure). Learn to be a proactive, earnest believer and the way life unfolds will make sense in terms of what matters most, rather than who you “are”. It’s a high form of efficacy and agency to understand and re-direct belief.
Roman Ryan 