Why False Beliefs Feel True
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| Image courtesy |
A
middle-aged gentleman in rural Spain of the early seventeenth century spends so
many nights reading tales of brave knights, enchanted castles, and noble quests
that the boundary between fiction and reality begins to dissolve. One morning,
he straps on a suit of rusty armour, mounts his old horse, renames himself Don
Quixote de la Mancha, and rides out into the world determined to revive the age
of chivalry.
Quixote is convinced that he is a knight-errant on a
messianic mission. His belief is unwavering, solid. That belief transmutes him
into a different personality altogether.
He mistakes ordinary inns for magnificent castles,
humble peasant girls for elegant princesses, and, most famously, towering
windmills for terrifying giants. His belief makes him charge at the windmills,
convinced that he is fighting monsters. He is thrown to the ground, bruised and
defeated. Even then he does not abandon his belief. The giants, he insists,
have been transformed into windmills by an evil enchanter determined to
frustrate his noble mission.
People think Don Quixote is deluded. To Don Quixote
himself, his world is perfectly coherent. Many new experiences are interpreted
in ways that preserve and reinforce what he already believes. Contradictory
evidence does not weaken his conviction; it simply becomes part of his mission
and its struggles.
Miguel de Cervantes was not merely writing a comedy
about an eccentric ageing man. He was revealing something timeless about the
human mind. We do not simply see the world as it is. We see it through the
stories we have absorbed, the expectations we carry, and the beliefs we already
hold.
Most of us are not as spectacularly mistaken as Don
Quixote. We do not charge at windmills with a lance. Yet all of us, at times,
mistake appearance for reality, interpret events through our perceptions, and
cling to beliefs that feel undeniably true even when the evidence points
elsewhere.
Why does this happen? Why can sincere, intelligent
people become convinced of things that are quite obviously false? And why does
falsehood often feel every bit as real as truth?
There have been many saints in Christianity whose behaviour
appeared as strange and irrational to their contemporaries as Don Quixote’s
behaviour appeared to those around him.
Francis of Assisi seemed as irrational as
Don Quixote to many of his contemporaries. After a privileged youth, he gave
away his wealth, embraced poverty, preached to birds, kissed lepers, called the
sun and the stars his brothers and sisters, and believed he was following
Christ in the sincerest way possible. Many thought he had lost his senses. His
own father reportedly regarded him as a disgrace.
Yet Francis was not living in a private fantasy
detached from reality, like Quixote. His actions, however unconventional, were
rooted in a coherent moral and spiritual vision shared by the Christian
tradition. Whether one accepts his religious beliefs or not, his life produced
observable good effects. He founded a movement, cared for the poor, and
inspired countless others.
Francis differed from Quixote in certain important
ways. The self-proclaimed knight mistakes windmills for giants because his
imagination reshapes external reality. Francis looks at the same ordinary world
but interprets it through his understanding of the teachings of Jesus. He does
not deny that lepers are lepers or that birds are birds. Rather, he sees them
as worthy of love because they are all creations of God.
Such important distinctions notwithstanding, the role
played by belief in the lives of both men is quite similar. Both Don Quixote and
Francis of Assisi remind us that humans do not merely perceive the world: they
interpret it through their beliefs. Saints, revolutionaries, political
ideologues, and ordinary people all live by certain beliefs that shape what
they notice, what they value, and what they regard as true. The crucial
question is whether our beliefs help us see reality more clearly or blind us to
it.
This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon 2.0
Previous parts of this series:
2: Belief as a Survival Mechanism
This series will end tomorrow.
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