Trust In Understanding

We do what is rewarded

To continue our exploration on how to become the most impactful person we can be, we will now focus on the importance of the second required mindset trait - the ability to think independently and trust our capacity to understand.

One of the things that is very interesting to note about this attribute is that it is often a part of us at a younger age. As kids, most of us had an insatiable drive to analyze everything and ask all sorts of questions. We were driven to explore and figure things out on our own all while not being afraid of making mistakes and learning from those mistakes.

In most cases, this aptitude does not seem to last for too long though. Even though our brain is continually reshaping itself to accommodate more and more information even at later stages of our life, a phenomenon often observed in psychology and also once famously described by Carl Sagan is that we tend to become less and less inclined to engage in independent inquiry as we grow up.

Different factors have been shown to play a role in this unfortunate outcome but perhaps the most influential is how we tend to learn and shape our behavior through what is called instrumental conditioning. Much like a dog learns to sit down if such action is followed by a treat or to stop peeing at home if such action is followed by a penalty, the same mechanisms of reinforcement and punishment are present in the reward system of the human brain. If our natural tendency to logically question things is discouraged, we will learn to give up on it. And if we are instead rewarded for other actions that we might not even know the meaning of, we will instinctively do more of those.

This, of course, raises a big concern. Society nowadays is structured in such a way that we are being continuously compensated for the latter. In school, we are not rewarded for independent thinking but for reciting back what we have read in the textbooks. At work, we are not rewarded for our contribution to the world but for our ability to make the company more money. Online, we are not rewarded for worthwhile initiatives (or very rarely are) but for posting appealing pictures and witty comments. We live in a society where we are constantly being rewarded for actions that do not stimulate independent thinking and, one could argue, even drives us away from it.

As a consequence, we become inevitably caught up in a delusional understanding of the world. Not only do we start believing that whatever society rewards must be the right thing to do, we also begin measuring the significance of our actions based on the rewards that we get. If we are, for example, getting good grades at university, earning a substantial amount of money at our job or amassing a lot of likes on our photos, we will intuitively assume that we are doing considerably well in life even though, in reality, we are just trapped in a bubble of rewards that have no real substance.

Under these circumstances, our sense of worth and accomplishment becomes increasingly dependent on external recognition. If our actions succeed in garnering other’s appreciation, we feel better about ourselves. If not, we try to find something that does. Having never learned to derive feelings of self-regard from one’s own independent thinking, we become hostages to what society rewards. But since each reward only stimulates our reward system for a fraction of a second and does not therefore lead to enduring feelings of pride and self-esteem, we become perpetually trapped in a loop of constantly seeking more and more recognition.

And while we may not be aware of it, this is merely the result of the conditioning from our contemporary culture. We might even have good intentions while young, of wanting to understand and think independently, but in a setting where such traits are not rewarded and occasionally even scolded, we let go of our critical thinking and become disproportionately dedicated to seeking approval of others.

However, it doesn’t have to be like that. Once we are aware of these dynamics, we can reclaim control. We can recognize that with constant reinforcement to behave in ways that we probably didn’t even understand, we have been conditioned to seek the recognition of those around us to feel better about our actions and ourselves, and that it is by bringing back our capacity to think independently that we can ultimately generate those feelings in a much more sustainable and healthy way.

Ultimately, the only reward that has some real substance is not the one steaming from society’s appraisal but the one coming from our actual, measurable impact in the world. This is, in truth, one of the principles that differentiates a visionary from someone who simply follows the system. A visionary couldn’t be less worried about what other people might potentially think because he or she knows that, at the end of the day, more than rewards or reputation, the only thing that matters is the difference one made in the world.

Objective vs intersubjective reality

As we have explored before, in a setting where we are not rewarded for our independent thinking but for actions that fit our current cultural landscape, we are rarely able to use our reason to generate feelings of confidence and self-esteem and become not only less and less inclined to engage in personal inquiry but also a lot more prone to follow up on what our family, friends, and society think.

While this predisposition might not immediately strike as particularly prejudicial, as we are often instructed to listen to those who are older and have more experience, it does bring with it certain implications we should be wary of. When we abdicate from actively questioning and understanding the world and let our actions and decisions be determined by whatever beliefs everyone seems to be praising and endorsing, we will inevitably and intuitively start placing more value and trust on the intersubjective reality than on the objective one.

There is only one (very big) problem with that - the intersubjective reality is an illusion. Contrary to the objective reality, which consists of things that remain true whether we believe in it or not (like gravity or trees), the intersubjective reality is made up of fictional beliefs. It is defined by myths that only exist for as long as people believe they do, like for example gods or corporations.

And so, we have to be really careful with it because by favoring widely shared opinions over a factual understanding of the world, what we are doing most of the time is actually entrusting our safety to an alternate reality that only exists in the shared imagination of people and is bound to vanish at some point in time.

In fact, in many cases, this is already happening today. We actually feel that money is real even though the value is given by people. We feel like going to university is safe even though world influencers such as Elon Musk or Bill Gates have often stated that it is not the safest option to get a job in the current economy. Furthermore, we also often feel that our future is safeguarded by working at a menial job even though study after study predicts that around half of all jobs will be replaced by robots in the upcoming years.

None of these beliefs are in line with the objective reality. And yet, because our sense of safety and security is not tied to our understanding but instead to what society accepts and endorses as a whole, we still experience an underlying reassuring feeling that we can trust in it and everything will be okay.

But no matter how many people share a belief, how widely accepted an opinion is or how real the intersubjectivity seems, the only reality that can ultimately define our safety and whereupon we can place our trust is the objective one. When a child develops tetanus because their parents refused vaccination or we struggle to find a job either because we were told we lacked the experience or were replaced by automation, we realize, in those moments, that the intersubjective reality simply does not hold up in the face of the objective one.

So while we might have grown up to derive more safety from acting in line with conventional societal beliefs than from relying on our own understanding, we should be very aware that most of those beliefs rarely accurately reflect the world in which we live in. Which is why if we want to develop a paradigm based on facts, one in which we can always fall back on and that can truly provide for our safety, that paradigm has to be based on the objective reality, not on the intersubjective one.

To further elaborate on the type of myths that make up the intersubjective reality, concepts such as ‘money’ or ‘Europe’ are a good example. These are constructs that most people believe to be as real as rocks and trees. Yet, money is just a piece of paper and Europe an imaginary area of land. If tomorrow no one would believe anymore that paper has value and land has borders, both of these concepts would simply disappear.

Some people might argue that there is no such thing as an objective reality and that everything is subjective. Whether that is true or not, it misses the point of this topic. The objective reality is here defined as everything that we can safely assume that exists within human perception and that is not dependent on human thought.

Individualism

As we have explored in these last two topics, both society’s system of rewards and the beliefs that populate the intersubjectivity have a lot of influence in our life choices. Naturally, this is something we should be particularly mindful about because the moment we are not relying on our critical thinking to inform our decisions but are rather allowing these to be determined by external circumstances, we are putting ourselves in a situation where our values and beliefs become an exact photocopy of our particular cultural setting.

Now it should be stated that this is not intrinsically bad. Learning the values and norms of our culture is fundamental for our ability to become a proficient member of society. But when we blindly follow what culture admonishes and lose the capacity to accurately determine which conditioning is valuable and which is not, our lifestyle becomes dangerously dependent on what the whole of society upholds.

And the thing is, despite all the advancements in technology, the globalization of knowledge via the internet, and the fact that our scientific progress can nowadays tell us a lot more about the brain (and even to significant extent about consciousness), current mainstream culture is not so much geared towards trying to understand what we are. It is instead more focused on an idea that has gained more and more traction over the years and is perhaps the biggest reason why the world has grown ever more depressed and unfulfilled: the notion of the individual.

Many people don't know but individualism, historically, is a very recent phenomenon. Until some generations ago, people lived in small, intimate communities, as a collective unit. Families had to rely on each other for almost everything, from working in the fields to fighting danger and disease, and personal preferences or desires were rarely given any real importance.

While records indicate that individualism was already on the rise in the early ‘90s, it was only with the advent of the Industrial Revolution that it began to take society by storm. As educational services became accessible to a wider range of the population and factories granted workers with higher salaries and better perks, we became more educated and self-reliant and could now venture on our own.

Under these new circumstances, the question moved from what was best for our family and other people to what was best for ‘me’. Catapulted by capitalism, the American Dream and the consumerism plea that we ought to be happy and are free to pursue our desires, we started focusing most exclusively on our own personal interests.

The rise in technology and the development of hugely popular social networking websites only served to accentuate this tendency. It created the sentiment that upholding our individuality was not only the most natural thing, it was actually necessary if one was to remain as a modern sociable citizen. This, combined with an increased emphasis of society on fame and wealth above all else, the habit of constantly comparing ourselves to the fabricated social lives of friends and acquaintances and the endless signs reminding us that we were not yet as bright, smart or beautiful, contributed to a 21st century widespread obsession with the self.

In a cultural setting such as this, the brain's reward system became, in a sense, disconnected from its purpose. Throughout evolution, the ways in which our DNA has mutated, our brain has expanded and our experience has eventually emerged have all been part of the same process: allowing life to move forward. Humans exist for a common goal - to take care of each other and evolve as a superorganism.

But by adopting a lifestyle where we only care about ourselves and the fulfillment of our own aspirations and desires, we inevitably squander the ability to live in line with our truest essence. It is not a coincidence that suicide and depression rates are on the rise in our current super individualistic society and that civilizations where the family and community are still the central pillar report very little of it. It turns out that devoting our lives to the betterment of the collective is exactly what provides meaning to our existence.

So perhaps the best conclusion we can draw from all of these understandings is that we should be very aware of the ways in which culture might have influenced our world paradigm. Because when we reflect on its effects, particularly on how in the past few decades we have witnessed a societal shift from a commitment to the collective to a focus on the individual, we realize that our self-centered lifestyle is, for a big part, merely a reflection of our culture. And it is by recognizing the ways in which we were conditioned that we can start seeing life in a bigger context, one where we take into consideration the scientific and collective nature of what we are and do not simply follow what our current individualistic society is suggesting.