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.