The Nature Of Belief
How Beliefs Shape Our Certainty
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” - Anaïs Nin
From the whispered stories around ancient fires to the viral tweets of today, humans have always been compelled to share their beliefs and their certainties. The mechanisms may have evolved—from stone tablets to digital tablets—but the underlying drive remains the same. Beliefs have always found ways to flow from one mind to another, carving channels through the landscape of human consciousness.
I wonder: From the times of the ancient Catholics to the modern day where people hold silly and personal beliefs, was it always the case that humans wanted to push their beliefs onto others—whether covertly or overtly?
I wonder how much this plays a part in modern social conditioning. When someone wishes for someone else to live the way they do, it is overpowering for the other person’s consciousness. The belief-peddler feels like they are in the right and not only that, they also have the backing of superior reason. Where back in the day the backing came from divine reason or a godly power in communion with the belief-peddler, today it often comes wrapped in the authority of science, data, or lived experience. (The worst authority being: I read it on the internet)
Hannah Arendt reminds us that humans “…can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.” Perhaps this desperate need to share our certainties stems from something deeper than mere conviction—it speaks to our fundamental need to create shared meaning in a world that often seems meaningless. Like ancient storytellers gathering around fires, we’re still trying to make sense of our existence together.
What’s fascinating is how this pattern of belief transmission has remained constant even as its expressions have transformed. The medieval monk copying manuscripts by candlelight and the modern influencer crafting viral content are engaged in surprisingly similar acts of conviction-sharing. Both are vessels for what anthropologist Dan Sperber calls the “epidemiology of representations”—the way beliefs spread through populations like contagious diseases.
If I look at people who have their little life hacks, their little values for what makes a good person, their little tricks for what makes a smart person, their little advice for what makes a financially savvy person, their little pointers for the way technology should be treated—then I’m looking at the same phenomena through a different lens. These modern certainties, despite their materialistic appearance, carry the same missionary zeal that once powered religious conversions.
Perhaps in our rush to understand belief, we sometimes forget to pause and wonder at its mystery. Like watching waves shape shorelines or winds carve mountains, we’re witnessing forces both ancient and immediate, both personal and universal.
Image by Morgan Housel
A Virus of Certainty
In the presence of convictions, a believer is born. Belief then passes onward through conviction—a mechanism that puts doubt to the side and allows the believer to pursue a course of action their belief accepts as true. It is nearly like a virus, belief is only confirmed when it converts someone else. There is no way for the belief to exist in isolation for that would drive the person mad. A convicted believer does not like to be wrong and does not like when their doubts bother their beliefs.
William James, in his seminal work “The Will to Believe,” suggests something profound about this process. He argues that certain beliefs require us to accept them before they can prove themselves true—something simple like confidence or believing in your ability to swim before entering the water. Yet this very mechanism that enables learning and growth can also trap us in cycles of self-confirming delusion. The swimmer who never enters the water, convinced of either their mastery or inadequacy, remains untested in their belief.
It’s funny how the world works so much on interpretation. The interpreter believes the information has been correctly interpreted and this makes them believe in the message. This message is crucial to the seed that will give birth to their theories. These theories will then take an emotional hold and will rise up towards the sky encompassing their whole sphere of experience. It is a strange and curious thing that even half-truths, under the powerful lens of belief, seem to be confirmed everywhere one looks.
When our interpretations align with others, we build bridges of understanding. But when they diverge, we risk creating isolated islands of certainty, each convinced of its own rightness. In our digital age, these islands have become echo chambers, reinforced by algorithms that reflect our beliefs back to us with mechanical precision and unfortunately causing only more social and ideological isolation. As Arendt observed, we risk losing the “common world” that makes genuine dialogue possible—that shared reality where different perspectives can meet and transform each other.
The person passing on their belief naturally thinks they are right but in this process they believe they are not only right but the only ones who are right. This exclusivity of belief is also common to more strands of dogmatic belief where a person cannot accept that other beliefs can be true alongside theirs. This exclusivity gives birth to a kind of fanaticism—but I feel this may depend on a person’s personality as well. There are covert and overt fanaticists. Some people have their unshakable beliefs but will never tell them to anyone or engage with anyone else’s beliefs. They do what they want, in the way they want for they are guided by a higher reason—either scientific, medical or divine.
“Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance,” wrote Samuel Butler, and modern research in cognitive psychology confirms this insight. We now know that our brains are wired to seek confirmation of our existing beliefs, what psychologists call “confirmation bias.” This natural tendency, essential perhaps for maintaining some psychological stability, becomes problematic in a world where beliefs can spread globally at the speed of light.
What strange creatures we are—seeking certainty while living in a universe that offers none. Yet this tension itself might hold a key to understanding our relationship with belief.
Between Doubt and Dogma
Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” - Bertrand Russell
It is natural for us to do this because the human mind works on selective attention. It selectively produces things based on what it has observed. Perception is never total and never absolutely objective but intimately subjective. Like a garden where we only tend to the plants we recognize, our minds cultivate the beliefs that feel familiar, that offer us stable ground to stand on.
What works for humans is to be confirmed in their little beliefs than to have them knocked out of the park all the time. If one’s beliefs were rejected all the time, the person would feel substantially ungrounded and would be under threat of going crazy. It does seem we need some sort of truth, even an inkling of it, to keep us grounded and sure that we exist. For our beliefs confirm our perceptions which also confirms that the world exist as we perceive it.
Contemporary research in neuroscience reveals something profound about this need for stability: our brains actually consume less energy when processing information that confirms our existing beliefs. Like water flowing downhill, we naturally seek the path of least resistance. But this efficiency comes at a cost—the same neural pathways that help us navigate the world can become trenches too deep to escape.
This is possibly why people choose to subscribe to harmful beliefs, dogmas, religions and social customs because it gives them this security and psychological safety. This psychological safety gives them the conviction of having an already accepted belief, a theory that needs not to be tested but reproduced and celebrated countless times. It is an efficient form of social grounding and a process that, I believe, has not been invented but exists in the way the human organism relates with itself. It is an outcome of the nature of the hidden social fabric we are a part of.
Hannah Arendt observed this collective agreement on reality—even when that reality is distorted—provides a kind of social shelter (The USA?). “The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon the clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide,” she wrote. In other words, even our delusions require shared understanding.
But it comes at a cost. The independent thinker is therefore rare and treads a dangerous path. They must be totally sure of what they are believing and why. They must build this system in partnership with nature and all that they observe in society and among its people. Each principle, theory or pattern must be checked to see if it conforms to reality in various circumstances. It is nearly a form of science itself and can be likened to developing philosophies or philosophizing in general.
In the end, it is up to us what we do with our beliefs, how much we choose to believe them and how much we push them onto others. My belief can be corrosive to me as well and without realising it I would be doing harm to myself all in the good name of reason, intellect, logic or god. Krishnamurti says all belief is destructive for it has roots in thought and by nature, thought is divisive. It makes two sides of a thing instead of leaving the thing whole.
Like a river that carves through rock, our beliefs shape not just our thoughts but the very landscape of our experience. Contemporary research in cognitive science suggests that our beliefs actually filter what we’re capable of perceiving—like coloured glasses we’ve worn so long we’ve forgotten they’re there. This is both our strength and our vulnerability: the same certainties that help us navigate the world can become the walls of our own psychological prison.
I also wonder if there are beliefs that originate emotionally—but my suspicion is that feelings felt are concretized and rationalised into beliefs by that very thought-producing capacity itself. We’re like architects building homes from our experiences, but sometimes we forget that homes need windows and doors, spaces for light and air to flow through. A belief held too tightly becomes a bunker rather than a shelter.
The challenge, perhaps, is not to live without beliefs—an impossible task—but to hold them more lightly, to maintain what philosopher Rebecca Solnit calls “hope in the dark.” This means cultivating a kind of dynamic stability, one that allows for both certainty and doubt, like a tree that bends with the wind rather than standing rigid against it.
So are our beliefs destructive? I’ll leave it to you to decide. But it stands to reason that we not be as right as we think we are. All belief works best with a healthy dose of doubt which not only refines our beliefs but also prevents us from senselessly forcing them upon others. Convincing others to adopt what we believe is a social mechanism that has its place but I wonder if we can use it for its generative power rather than for its destructive and degrading power.
The path forward might lie in Arendt’s concept of “enlarged thinking”—the capacity to consider multiple perspectives while maintaining our own ground. This isn’t merely about tolerance or relativism; it’s about imagining how the world appears to others while holding onto our own truth. Like a tree with deep roots that can still sway in the wind, we might learn to be both grounded and flexible in our beliefs.
This expanded way of thinking allows our social beliefs to not only empower individuals but also bring them together into a cohesive society that is stronger because it is together. This is not a call for relativism, but for a more nuanced understanding of how beliefs can either bridge or barrier our connections with others and ourselves.
Like the ancient practice of philosophical dialogue, perhaps we can learn to dance with our beliefs rather than being imprisoned by them. In this dance, both certainty and doubt have their place, each step informed by the wisdom that comes from knowing how little we truly know.