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Chapter Eight
March 2008

Worldviews – Path or Prison?

Often I walk in the mountains, following trails that were, perhaps, laid down by wolves, or elk, or animals so far in the distant past that we have no record of them now. Humans have taken over the maintenance in recent times, and we improve and enhance these trails for the benefit of all – be it bear or deer, chipmunk or tourist. (Although occasionally, on an old trail seldom used by my fellow bipeds, I see fresh signs of a large bear—and after a brief shudder, a smile crosses my face—to feel the palpable presence of the wildness that once ruled these lands.)

In the mountains, it is much easier to travel if someone has blazed the trail before you – and if countless others have maintained it through the years, the centuries, the millennia. It is not necessary that they have done this intentionally, for simply to walk the path is to preserve it for the next traveler. I thank the countless animals, and humans, who have traveled these trails – mostly for their own benefit and enjoyment – with no thought of the service they are providing to me.

Trails are essential in life, whether in the mountains, in the desert – or in becoming a doctor or lawyer or Cherokee Chief. Trails through the pathways of life create channels through which wisdom and knowledge flow, and – when working properly – make smoother and safer the journey of each new traveler.

Yet trails also create limitations – limiting what one can see and where one can easily go. Trails define where to look, how to look, and what is important to look at. Outwardly, trails are visible to the naked eye. Inwardly, trails are less visible, but no less real – for they are the beliefs, values, expectations and assumptions in which we are imbedded. Inwardly, trails are the worldviews by which we live.

As mentioned before, each one of us sees and experiences life through a lens, a set of assumptions embedded in us as we grew up—then modified by decisions we made for ourselves about where we would focus our attention, with whom we would spend our time, and what we would believe—and refuse to believe. This lens, this trail, is our worldview, the way we understand who we are and what life is about. It is the path that we follow  – and it is also our prison. It is path because it shapes our thoughts and our understandings into manageable channels. And it is prison because it predisposes us to see things in a particular way, thereby blinding us to seeing and knowing ourselves—and our world—in a different and more complete way.

To catch a glimpse of this process, think of a point of view you strongly disagree with – perhaps held by those of another religion, another cultural group, or another political party. To you, their view might seem completely wrong – perhaps even unhealthy or dangerous. Why do they not see it that way? Because they are looking from within a framework of assumptions, a lens, that is quite different from the one you are looking through.

Many people are so embedded in a worldview that they do not recognize they are in one – to them, the assumptions from which they live are simply truth itself, given by God or the Laws of Nature, incontrovertible and unassailable. Anyone standing in this place has no position from which to question, let alone challenge, his/her worldview – even if it is filled with contradictions, and leads to actions that are destructive, or even absurd. As a friend described this situation, it is as if the child were given a brown paper bag as they were growing up, and told that all the answers to the fundamental questions were contained in that bag. And for the next 40, 50, 60 years, they carry that bag around without ever looking inside. When anyone asks what they believe, they just point to the bag and say, “There are the answers.”

The beliefs within which one lives can be held fairly consciously – including the ability to discus them and define them with great precision. Or they can be almost totally unavailable to the analytical mind, appearing as “givens,” feelings that a person just takes for granted about what is right and wrong, good and bad, worthy or unworthy. Most of us are somewhere in between – some of our assumptions are conscious to us, others deeply buried and felt as “givens.”

To capture the full complexity of this, it is crucial to realize that just because one’s assumptions are unconscious does not mean they are unhealthy. Even if unconscious, they can be serving a healthy and vital function in a person’s life. However, it is also possible that a person’s unconscious assumptions lie at the very heart of the problems he or she is facing. And just this is the argument for consciousness – how will you ever know if your worldview is causing your problems if you are so embedded in it that you cannot see how it is affecting your life? 

In order to train an elephant, at a very young age it is tied to a tree with a strong rope. The rope and the tree both hold tight against all pulling and tugging when the elephant is young, creating a deep belief that it is useless to try to escape. After this belief has been deeply embedded, the trainer can thereafter use a flimsy rope and a small tree, yet the elephant does not try to escape – forever assuming that the lessons of childhood are unassailable and unbreakable. Have you pulled at your ropes lately?

One further complexity still: Even if the assumptions we hold are somewhat conscious to us, we can still be imprisoned by them – they can still be causing our problems – for the mind is truly extraordinary at creating rationalizations to convince us that we are “right.” A Yale graduate student proved this point back in 1956 by asking a group of people to rate the desirability of a number of items – then giving each person a chance to keep for themselves one of two items that they had rated as equality desirable.

After the participants in the study had made their choice of the item they wanted, they were asked to rate the items again, and “suddenly they had a new perspective. If they had chosen the electric sandwich press over the toaster, they raised its rating and downgraded the toaster.” Uniformly, the participants began to convince themselves that they had made the right choice, to rationalize their point of view to themselves. As summarized by columnist John Tierney: “In general, people deal with cognitive dissonance — the clashing of conflicting thoughts — by eliminating one of the thoughts. The notion that the toaster is desirable conflicts with the knowledge that you just passed it up, so you banish the notion. The cognitive dissonance is gone; you are smug.” Thus even things that have been conscious to us can be “banished” from awareness if they interfere with what we want to see and believe.

Your worldview may be contributing to the problems of the world

Just as your worldview may be causing some of the problems in your life, the clashing of worldviews is responsible for many of the problems we humans have faced with each other throughout history. In fact, much of history is a recounting of the struggles we have had in this arena. And in modern times, as the world has become more and more crowded, the problems, both individually and collectively, have grown greater and greater.

In past ages, most people were raised in cultures that gave clear and consistent messages to everyone around about what was important and how one should live—in essence, gave a clear and consistent set of rules for how the game of life was supposed to be played. Living in such a time was much simpler, for everyone shared most of the underlying assumptions with their neighbors, shared with those in their community most of the rules and beliefs about how life was to be lived. Further, significant distances usually separated differing groups from each other, distances not easily bridged by the transportation and communication systems of that time.

This simpler state was not necessarily a better way to live—as will be discussed later—but living with others within a unified and shared worldview did prevent many of the problems a lot of us face today. In our modern world, many of the difficulties – between individuals, between groups of people, between nations, and between cultures – arise from the clash of deeply held assumptions between individuals and groups, from a collision of worldviews. And when worldviews collide, the reaction of most people seems to be to “support the home team.”

Often with two fiercely competing football teams, the fans from each side are convinced that they have the best players, have worked harder, or that their time has come—each coming to believe that they “deserve to win.” The supporters of each team can be equally fervent in this conviction—even to the point of believing they have a “divine right” to win, perhaps even praying to the same God for victory (as if God’s job was to decide which team should win a football game).

Even more with competing worldviews, the fans of each side frequently believe that they are right, and that they deserve to win. When such worldviews collide, as they do more and more often in this modern world, the dangers and cost increase exponentially. So even as our worldviews and assumptions help to create a path for our lives, at the same time they are increasingly the cause of the problems we face on this evermore crowded planet.

Through the centuries, of course, several solutions to this dilemma have been tried. The most common was for a group to try to persuade everyone around to adopt their point of view. If persuasion failed, force was often tried. Sometimes, when this failed, an attempt was made to completely eliminate all those who did not agree. Amazingly, these solutions are still being tried in various parts of the world today – amazing because such attempts have been completely unsuccessful over several thousand years –the world today having ever more people, and more competing points of view than ever. Further, almost all attempts at force have brought, over time, almost as much difficulty to the perpetrators as to the purged and punished. It would seem obvious then, that after thousands of years of failure we would conclude that these solutions simply do not work. Yet we often act like the person in a sinking rowboat who is furiously bailing water, yet mindlessly dumping each filled bucket into the back of the boat.

Diagnosing the disease

Each of us searches for a solid place to stand, wants to believe that our beliefs and assumptions are true and right – and giving us valid guidance as to how to live a full and meaningful life. Yet many of us often feel confused, struggle with decisions, make mistakes, and find ourselves sad, angry, and depressed. When in these states, we often think that if the world would just operate the way we think it should, everything would be fine. “If only the world would conform to my expectations,” we cry inside, “then I would be happy.” But the world does not choose to cooperate, and we struggle.

At some point, we might look around to see how others are doing. When we do, we discover that a considerable part of the time a large number of people in the modern world are alienated, confused, angry, depressed, or sad. Many are spending their time on things that seem shallow and meaningless, and most do not seem to be finding greater fulfillment or happiness than ourselves. (Some of us have the opposite tendency – to look out and project on others that they are doing well, while “I” am not – leading to the feeling that “there is something terribly wrong with me.” When I have talked to people who feel this, and ask who it is that is doing well, they often point to others that I know who are clearly not doing so well. This tendency to see others as doing well while oneself is not is a very common pattern, perhaps growing out of a sense of unworthiness, or a fear that if others aren’t doing well there is no hope).

Sometimes we encounter those who profess to happiness and contentment, but often they seem to be adopting this stance because they think they should, or because they wish to feel superior – while the feeling one gets is that of bravado, of a salesman trying to sell an overvalued product—perhaps to themselves as much as to you. (As far as I can tell, Kierkegaard was mostly right in saying that there are two types of people in the world: those who are suffering, and know that they are suffering; and those who are suffering, and do not know it.)

Occasionally we might hear or read about someone who truly seems to have found fulfillment, meaning, contentment, happiness. Of these lucky few, books are written, movies are made, and stories are told. But in most cases, these “special” ones seem to have been born with a gift, had incredible luck, or followed a path that seems too difficult to emulate.

So what to do? Do we attempt once again to beat the world into submission, trying ever harder to persuade it to conform to our view of how it should be – hoping against hope that a redoubled effort will bring the results that have eluded us thus far?

Maybe it is time for radical measures! Do we dare begin questioning the underlying assumptions from which we are living? Is it possible that our worldview is more cause than cure of our disease? To put the matter succinctly, your worldview could be wrong, or misguided, or contradictory. It could be causing a lot of the problems you face, as well as contributing to the problems of the world. But how would you know? It seems “given” to you – it seems the framework within which you must solve your problems and answer your questions. And how do you get to a perspective far enough outside of your assumptions to consider their true efficacy?

A Thought Experiment

Think of someone you know who is struggling in life right now. If you look carefully, you might be able to identify some of the assumptions that person is making that create the difficulties – a fantasy, an expectation about how the world is supposed to work, a stubborn belief, a “moral” position that does not seem wise, or even moral to you. If you can see the stuck place – why can’t your friend? Because his or her assumptions are embedded, accepted as reality, and are assumed to be the path to answers, rather than the source of the problems.

But how do you know you are not caught in your own framework of assumptions just as they are caught in theirs? Could this be the cause of many of your problems – just as you see from an outside perspective that it is the cause of theirs? Can you identify just one example of this in your life?

Finding a cure

Is there a place to stand that is solid, a belief or set of beliefs that will serve through all the trials and tribulations of life? I believe there is, but to arrive at this solid ground, we must first examine the unfirm ground on which so many castles of belief have been built. Discovering the nature of these shifting sands, perhaps we will come to a clearer understanding of the ground that will hold through all the tides and turbulence we will encounter.

To begin this process, we must try to understand how we got here, the framework within which we make our decisions, and what alternatives for this process there might be. If you can catch a glimpse of all this, you will begin to see how dramatically your worldview affects the way you experience life, and you will be able to explore the ways that your beliefs and underlying assumptions are creating many of the problems you encounter—and preventing their solution. Then you will be ready for the exhilarating and sometimes scary step of participating in the creation of your own life.

The following chapters, then, will consider how our worldviews arose, how they aid us, and how they hinder us. From this place we can consider how to use them most effectively – and ultimately escape their imprisoning effects in the enterprise of creating a fulfilled, happy, and meaningful life.