I’ve been reading pretty extensively about the period leading up to and following the Second World War. One idea keeps coming back again and again: The sheer power of a few people’s beliefs was able to radically and irrevocably change the world.
Few of us would doubt the power of beliefs. Every act of design, every effort to construct something new is an act of belief. Faith is what enables the architect to envision and see to completion the great skyscrapers of city skylines. Faith enables the missionary to go to far-off places and share ideas. Faith enables the great explorers and pioneers of each age’s respective frontier. Faith enables the entrepreneur to build great new companies and organizations.
You see, a belief is something we decide to accept as reality, without being able to fully understand it or explain it. Said another way, I decide to believe something (that doesn’t yet exist) into reality when I create it.
Beliefs are creative. They actually have the power of making themselves come true. They have the power of altering reality.
But here’s what really startled me: faith and belief can also be incredibly destructive.
For example: the belief that anyone who looks different than I do is a threat to be destroyed; the belief that anyone who believes anything different that I do must be silenced at any cost; the belief that my race, country, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, philosophy or politics can justify the most unthinkable brutality imaginable. These are also beliefs that have altered reality, and not for the better.
Anthony De Mello says that it is the same process that produces the saint and the suicide bomber. They both use the power of their belief to shape reality.
When I am blindly possessed by my beliefs, no matter how lofty, divine, or unimpeachable they may seem to me, I run the risk of unleashing the potentially destructive power they inherently contain.
How then do I know which is which? A destructive belief is always born of fear. Whenever anyone’s beliefs are born of fear — fear of the other, fear of scarcity, fear of alienation or of not belonging, fear of the unknown or the different — the chances of the consequences of those beliefs being destructive and not constructive increase exponentially.
If fear is driving my beliefs, which in turn drive my behavior and therefore my results and influence, someone is going to get hurt, first of all myself.
Acquiring a state of mind to be able to calmly and objectively see my own beliefs and their causes and roots is a supremely valuable skill. Too often we believe that we’ll arrive at this state of mind by “facing” our fears, which is another way of saying confronting or fighting them. But, what we fight we inevitably subject ourselves to. The more we fight against something, the more power we give it.
Instead, when we connect with our fears, realize their value for keeping us safe and alive and explore them without judgment, condemnation or resentment, then we are able to get to the root of our fears and resolve them once and for all. Self-connection becomes the surest path to true self-knowledge and ultimately to courage.
I can only image what world we would be living in today if people like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and others would have had the courage to follow this path instead of the paths of fear they chose.
