Growing Beyond Childhood Beliefs

Reflections on skillful rationality

Our oldest daughter (twin 1), age 8

A quote I love

“[It’s] as though there's something in science like the shine of the Patronus Charm, driving back all sorts of darkness and madness, not right away, but it seems to follow wherever science goes. …It has something to do with seeking the truth, I think...with being able to change your mind from what you grew up believing.”

I love this quote¹ from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky (which I talk about in more detail in this post), because it highlights a simple but vital aspect of skillful, rational thinking: “being able to change your mind from what you grew up believing.”

This can encompass all kinds of beliefs—political, religious, psychological, etc.—and it sets up as a value being able to question and change those beliefs, whatever they are, as you grow in life.

And it’s not saying that you must or should change those beliefs, by the way—only that it is good to have the ability to do so.

Core beliefs

I would guess that the most important kind of beliefs to be able to change are the deep, internalized, “core” beliefs or messages about ourselves that we absorb in childhood. (These are the beliefs one works with in CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, along with various other types of therapy and healing work.)

Here are some real-life examples of core beliefs, from myself and my close loved ones (according to my perception of them):

• Me: “I must suppress my own feelings and take care of other people’s instead.”

• My partner: “I’m only valuable for what I do for people.”

• My sibling: “I’m unloveable except when I perform well.”

• My closest friend: “I am not at all worthy of love or care, so I must work myself to exhaustion to try to meet even a bare minimum of my needs, ward off disasters, and outrun my chronic sense of shame.”

We (myself and those loved ones) are each working, in our own ways and at our own paces, to deprogram ourselves from those core childhood beliefs. It’s a long, hard road—but each step we take on it makes our lives better.

Religious, political, & philosophical beliefs

Here is the question that turned my world upside-down (actually, right-side-up, though at the time it felt upside-down) once I finally dared ask it, after years of baby-stepping towards it from my fortress of fundamentalist religion: “How do I know I’m not just indoctrinated into believing this?”

How would I tell whether I believed what I did (eg., that God exists, that my church had the right scripture interpretations, etc.) because it was true, or because I’d been indoctrinated into believing it was true? The world would look the same to me either way.

I finally grappled my way to this answer:

• Indoctrination-fueled belief is rigidly closed-minded and one-sided, unwilling to truly hear and consider opposing arguments, and tends to have defensive and dogmatic energy.

• In contrast, belief fueled by genuine truth-seeking will seriously hear and consider arguments from all sides of a question with calm and curiosity.

By that point, I could see that I was in the former group. And I wanted to be in the latter one.

Quote from my journal at that time:

“It really disturbs me that I am so ignorant and that I lean so much on what I’m taught—that at my age I have not read differing opinions and formed my own conclusions. Instead, I parrot what I’ve heard and read…I cannot defend my beliefs to people who believe differently than I do and who have read different materials than I have, because I haven’t reasoned from an objective stance. I am biased and sheltered.”

Thus began my new life. What followed from there was the emergence of a life that I could actually live, with joy and forward motion, instead of the strain and confusion that kept me crippled for so long while I tried to live within a closed system of belief, never allowed to think beyond its walls.

How to start?

It’s difficult to begin examining one’s beliefs, whether psychological or philosophical, because, as Yudkowsky discusses in his essay sequence Rationality A-Z (paraphrased), “beliefs don’t seem like beliefs. They just seem like how the world is.”

So, then, how can we learn to start recognizing our beliefs, in order to examine and grow beyond them as necessary?

One way I’ve found is to pay attention to the sound of certainty inside me.

Beliefs—especially unexamined ones, in my experience—tend to either:

• fire us up with dogmatic energy, as with political and religious beliefs, or

• freeze us into fear-based patterns of behavior, as with the core beliefs I mentioned above.

Both are fueled by a feeling of certainty.

By contrast, opinions that we reason our way to with rational, open, and critical thinking tend to feel a lot more tempered and peaceful, because:

1. We’ve taken the time to understand the various complex issues involved, so we have a broader view of the matter, including the limits of our understanding.

2. Our security does not now depend on reality complying with our beliefs, but on our own skills and courage for facing reality, whatever it may actually be.

Forward progress

I want to keep growing stronger in my ability to change my mind from what I grew up believing—to keep building a life of meaning and solidity beyond what my parents’ generation could access and that of their parents beyond them. This is what progress looks like, and I think it is what most parents wish for their children in the long term, though they may feel discomfort with the particulars of their children’s choices in the short term.

One last quote from Eliezer, who himself is a rationalist who grew beyond his family’s Jewish beliefs:

“You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.”

Again, this is how progress happens. And it’s the path I want to be on.

Are you with me?

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1. Full quote, from chapter 47 of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:

"I'm not sure how to heal Slytherin House," Harry said slowly. "But I know it's something you and I will end up having to do. It took centuries for science to dawn over the Muggle world, it only happened slowly, but the stronger science got, the further that sort of hatred retreated." Harry's voice was quiet, now. "I don't know exactly why it worked that way, but that's how it happened historically. As though there's something in science like the shine of the Patronus Charm, driving back all sorts of darkness and madness, not right away, but it seems to follow wherever science goes. The Enlightenment, that was what it was called in the Muggle world. It has something to do with seeking the truth, I think... with being able to change your mind from what you grew up believing... with thinking logically, realizing that there's no reason to hate someone because their skin is a different color, just like there's no reason to hate Hermione Granger... or maybe there's something to it that even I don't understand. But the Enlightenment is something that you and I belong to now, both of us. Fixing Slytherin House is just one of the things we have to do."