Aaron Moritz - Believe Nothing (but understand as much as you can)
0 (0 Likes / 0 Dislikes)
- How you coping, kid?
- It's so weird.
Just when I think I've a handle on things
something wholly unbelievable presents itself.
Sometimes I wish I'd just stayed [at] home.
- You sound like the Man.
- What is He like?
- He likes to listen to people talk.
Christ loved to sit around the fire
and listen to me and the other guys.
Ya'know whenever
we´re going on about unimportant shit
he always had a smile on his face.
If there's only real beef
with mankind, it's the shit
that gets carried out in his name:
wars, bigotry, televangelism.
The big one though,
is the fractioning of all the religions.
He said mankind got it all wrong
by taking a good idea
and building a belief structure on it.
- You´re saying having beliefs is a bad thing?
- I just think it's better to have ideas.
I mean, you can change an idea.
Changing a belief is trickier.
People die for it. People kill for it.
[voice echoing] People kill for it.
(DC) So?
(Narrator) Don’t believe what’s in the papers.
Don’t believe what’s on TV.
Don’t believe what’s on the internet.
Don’t believe activists.
Don’t believe special interest groups.
Don’t believe corporations.
Don’t believe scientists.
Don’t believe priests.
Don’t believe your friends. Don’t believe banks.
Don’t believe me.
Don’t even believe your own senses.
"You're saying having beliefs is a bad thing?"
There is no way to know the truth
about anything for sure, ever.
So instead of wasting time
choosing and believing this or that,
believe nothing,
but understand as much as you can.
Understandings are only approximations.
They are ever-changing and evolving.
New facts and new informations
can sometimes turn your understandings
over on their head.
If you are wrong about something
and you get corrected
you don’t have to feel stupid
or ignorant
for ‘believing’ something
that was wrong,
instead you can rejoice at your new knowledge
and updated understandings.
Understandings have no emotional attachment
and therefore allow us
to align ourselves with new realities as soon as they
become evident,
freeing us from the lag time
and emotional upheaval
involved in deconstructing
a deeply held belief.
To say that we 'understand' something
is likely true,
rather than saying we ‘believe’ it,
places us into a new paradigm where the
false dichotomy of ‘true’
and ‘not true’ is not recognized.
Because the real essence
of what I’m promoting here
is the removal of absolutist thinking.
The end of black and white,
of good and evil, of true and false.
These ideas are
useful sometimes for a discussion
but ultimately lead to confusion
because they don’t have any
real-life substance.
Not a single person or a single thing
is all good or completely bad,
it’s all shades of grey.
So when presented with an idea
the question is not "Is this idea true?",
it’s "How much information do we have
to support this idea right now?"
The more information we have,
the more confident we can be that
this idea is true.
Thinking like this, truth then becomes
a never-quite-attainable,
quite imaginary abstraction.
It’s like infinity:
You can keep counting and
you’ll keep getting further ahead
but you’ll never reach infinity.
The best thing that we can do
is continuously approximate the truth
with ever growing certainty,
but realizing that
certainty in and of itself
is also an unattainable abstraction.
That doesn't mean that we
can't get close,
there are many things
that we can be nearly certain of,
but we can’t be afraid
of questioning everything,
from our most superficial,
to our most basic assumptions,
if we want to keep making progress.
We must also keep in mind that
valid questioning can never
come from belief,
but only from reasoned evidence,
resulting in an updated understanding.
"I just think it's better to have ideas.
I mean, you can change an idea."
I'm gonna make that my motto
or mantra or something.
So understand what’s in the news,
understand who writes the news
and why they write the news
and who they write it for.
Understand what your friends say,
and try to understand
where they might have gotten that information from.
And what biases they might be projecting
on to that information.
Understand that activists
usually have very good intentions
and are often saying something important,
but understand their passion
and the fact that passions
can sometimes lead people astray
including lying for their causes.
Same thing for priests and politicians.
Understand that you can find
supporting evidence
for almost any position you want,
if you look for it.
And our greatest tool for weighting
the value and accuracy
of any evidence,
of approximating certainty with understandings,
is science.
But understand that scientists
are human
and they are not infallible
and they are often wrong.
Especially when financial interests
pressure researchers to find
the results they want, and research
is severely limited in any field
from which a profit cannot be made,
or a field that may infringe
on someone elses profit.
Understand that our senses and memories
can play tricks on us and others,
and our minds tend to mold our
perceptions of experiences
to previously held notions,
without us even realising it.
Maybe you disagree,
maybe you have different understandings.
That's good, that's fine.
Just don't believe any of them.
But some wonder that without belief,
can these changing understandings
be ‘good’ enough
to direct us in our behavior?
If I don’t believe
that killing someone is wrong,
they wonder, why don’t I just go out
and have a blast
slaughtering as many people as I can?
Well, it´s because I value human life.
And this is a value I have cultivated
based on the understanding
that I am a human life,
and I understand and see and feel
the beauty of other human lives.
I see myself in them,
and to do them harm
is to harm myself,
is to harm everyone.
No need to believe anything
to see that.
At least that’s how I understand it.
I also understand that
the less harm there is going around,
the better off we will all be.
So yeah, I think understandings
can actually offer
a much more concrete direction
for our species,
because as with any new frontier,
you must draw the map
as you discover the landscape.
Only a fool believes that he knows
what is past
the next mountain before he’s crossed it.
Another thing that I have
come to understand is:
(George Carlin) If it’s true
that we’re all from the center of a star,
every atom in each of us
from the center of a star,
then we’re all the same thing.
Even a coke machine
or a cigarette butt
in the street in Buffalo
was made out of atoms
that came from a star.
They’ve all been recycled thousands of times
as have you and I.
And therefore, it’s only me out there,
so what is there to be afraid of?
What is there that needs
solace-seeking? Nothing.
There’s nothing to be afraid of,
because it’s all us.
The trouble is, we have
been separated by being born
and given a name and an identity
and being individuated.
We've been separated from the oneness,
and that’s what religion exploit,
that people have this yearning
to be part of the overall one again.
So they exploit that.
They call it God.
They say he has rules,
and I think it’s cruel.
I think you can do it
absent religion.
(Carl Sagan) Shouldn't we consider
in every nation major changes
in the traditional ways
of doing things,
a fundamental restructuring of economic,
political, social and religious institutions?
We've reached the point where
there can be no more
special interests or special cases.
Fundamental changes in society are
sometimes labeled impractical
or contrary to human nature.
As if nuclear war were practical
or as if there's only one human nature.
But fundamental changes
can clearly be made;
we're surrounded by them.
The old appeals to racial,
sexual, religious chauvinism
and to rabid nationalist fervour
are beginning not to work.
A new consciousness is developing
which sees the Earth as a
single organism
and recognizes that an organism
at war with itself is doomed.
We are one planet.
One of the great revelations of
the age of space exploration
is the image of the Earth
finite and lonely,
somehow vulnerable,
bearing the entire human species
through the oceans of space and time.
(Narrator) Understanding that we depend on
our environment, our planet
and each other for survival,
and also understanding
that our approximations of reality
are likely
to keep on their path of
continual evolution
have currently lead me
to the conclusion to support
The Zeitgeist Movement
and The Venus Project.
These two aspects
that have just been described are
central to the movements' tenants.
And I suggest anyone
who got anything out of this video
or enjoyed it in any way;
go and check out
these ideas with an open mind and
come to your own understandings.
"Interdependence is and ought to be
as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency.
Man is a social being."
-Mahatma Gandhi