Pathological Belief Systems

Since the scientific age began, we've lived in a universe where the bottom strata of reality is considered to be something that's dead, like dirt. It's like it's matter, it's objective, it's external, and there isn't any element of it that lends any reality to phenomena like meaning or purpose. That's all being relegated to the subjective and, in some ways, to the illusory.

But it's by no means self-evident that that set of presuppositions is correct because we lack infinite knowledge. There are many things about the structure of being that we don't understand, the main one being consciousness. We can't account for it at all, and we can't account for the role it appears to play in the transformation of potential into actuality, which is a role that's been recognized by physicists for almost a hundred years now and which remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in science.

There are other ways of looking at what's real, and these other ways have some advantages. One of the advantages they have is that they protect us. Knowing these other ways of operating within reality—defining reality—protects us from certain kinds of pathologies. Modern people are prone to a fair number of pathologies that stem from the assumptions of their systems they use to define reality.

One of those pathologies is a kind of nihilistic hopelessness, which is a consequence of the recognition that, in the final analysis, nothing really has any meaning. Because life is difficult and that's a meaning that you can't escape, being forced to abandon your belief in a positive or a transcendent meaning can leave you weak at the times when you really can least afford to be weak.

There are more important pathologies that it's opened us up to—and those are pathologies of belief. I think we saw the most horrifying examples of that—hopefully the most horrifying example— in the 20th century, where people whose belief systems were shattered, at least in part by the competition between religious and scientific viewpoints, turned in large numbers to mass movements that were in error in every way.

These movements were a substitute, a more rational in some sense substitute for religious beliefs that appeared no longer tenable. The consequence of that was just about annihilation. We came close to annihilation twice—once in the 60s and once in the 80s. Even without the totality of annihilation, we lost hundreds of millions of people as a consequence of pathological belief systems in the 20th century.