How Certainty Gets Made
on Apr 26 in Politics, Religion by adminHow do one’s convictions reach the point where they are more important than the life of another, and why would one die to defend what they have never even seen? To answer these questions we must first understand certainty, and to understand certainty we must look at how the human mind is informed. Such a task will require us to surmount difficulties and digest heady concepts. However, if we have devoted millions of dollars to educate people about potentially lethal weapons carried by a few, should we not be even more devoted to understand a potentially lethal attitude carried by almost everyone? With the importance of our pursuit before us then, let us turn our attention to the task at hand.
The first step to understanding certainty is to define it so that we are both thinking the same thing. Certainty is the act of being certain, and to be certain is a mental attitude one takes to a particular fact – or set of facts – so that validity is no longer a question (Dictionary.com).
Usually the facts that achieve the status of certainty in one’s mind are those which have great personal meaning, or which tell the individual about the purpose of life, the construction of the universe, or how they should live. Just as one builds a house from material they are sure will endure the elements, so people build their personal identities – the way they see themselves – from facts they are certain of.
Therefore, when a well-placed question, a traumatic experience, or a person who is certain of completely different ideas enters our life, we are jarred us to the core and forced to question things were once thought were beyond question. This may not sound volatile but it is in fact comparable to a personal apocalypse.
Since the ideas we are certain of form the foundation upon which our entire life and personality are built, whenever they are called into doubt it is as though one is attempting to end our life, and in a manner of speaking this is a real threat. For example, if the information pertains to the nature or existence of God and it causes us to change our position – to move from belief to unbelief or vice versa, what are we to do? It is not as simple as merely swapping our ideas; we are forced to reconsider our values, change our perspectives, and reorder our lives.
Not only this, but since our social relationships and economic means are usually connected to our values and beliefs about the world, there is a great probability these will be damaged or destroyed if we change. If you think this is an overstatement merely consult Jews whose families have had their funerals after they converted to Christianity, or atheists who lost friends, family, and income after confessing disbelief in their former religious system.
At this point I am sure you are wondering why we are discussing the consequences of doubting – or changing – the principles we are currently certain of when we were supposed to be defining certainty and discussing how it is created. The reason is that to study how certainty is made is to itself cast doubt upon the things we are certain of, and thus we must be made aware of the sub-conscious calculations which keep us closed to the discussion before we can have it.
I know what you are thinking, “Why would I want to continue talking to you after you have told me changing my relationship to the items of which I am certain can radically alter my life?” The answer to that question can be summed up in one word: betterment. All human advancement has its roots in doubt. The understanding we have today of disease arose because some far-sighted individual did not believe that spirits and moon light were the cause of illness, the knowledge we possess about the weather arose because some sharp wit did not believe that Heaven punished nations for the crimes of a few immoral individual, and the amazing technology we are surrounded with that brings such joy and ease into our lives came to be because a virile intellect doubted that the devices then present were the pinnacle of human achievement. Thus, you do not have to continue reading but I am certain that the sages of the past knew what they were talking about when they said it is misunderstanding that is at the root of human suffering and woe. With that in mind let us then turn our attention to the manner in which certainty is manufactured.
At birth we are not dropped into a vacuum and left to make our own conclusions about reality, instead we are born into the world at a specific place occupied by a specific group of people. From the moment we take our first breath we begin to learn the ideas about the world maintained by the people around us. In fact education takes up the biggest part of our life; from day one to the end of our adolescence. We learn the sounds used by members of our group to communicate, the thoughts they think about the world, and the reasons for doing things the way they are done. Thus, we acquire what psychologists call our, “schema” or our way of understanding the world and ourselves (Narine).
Two processes are always at work throughout the creation of schema; classical conditioning – which involves the way an individual learns how to relate to things beyond their control – and operant conditioning – which involves the way a person’s actions are modified by the consequences they bring (Narine).
The first of these was recognized by a Russian physiologist named Ivan Pavlov who was trying to understand digestion. In the course of his studies he began to work with dogs and found that they would drool as though they were fixing to eat whenever events leading to food being placed before them began to occur. Pavlov eventually recognized that the dogs had related specific stimuli – items or events which stimulate the mind- with food, and they were drooling because they anticipated its appearance (Nairne).
In the same way people learn to associate certain stimuli with a certain type of future. For example when we hear thunder in the distance we anticipate that it is going to rain. Just as the dogs knew food was coming because men in white coats appeared, so do we expect rain when we feel the sky’s rumble.
Over time people make millions of associations like this, and come to understand the causal flow of their world through them. They can be positive, like the association between the appearance of grandma and the reception of candy, or they can be negative, like the appearance of a bully and the reception of pain. This process occurs over and over until we become programmed by our culture to associate certain things with certain outcomes or states of mind.
The way this connects to certainty is that often doubting one’s cultural values is associated with bad things or futures. An immediate example of this is found in the story of humanity’s fall contained in the first book of the Bible; a book whose teachings are woven deeply into our cultural fabric. There all of humanity’s woe and suffering is brought about when Eve doubted God’s words and ate a fruit forbidden by God at the behest of a fallen angel in the form of a wily serpent. Thus, doubt is associated with all the pain and suffering humanity now experiences as well as a fallen angel bent on our destruction. It is no wonder then that certainty is so highly valued, and that people avoid looking behind the curtains.
The second process – operant conditioning – was studied by B.F.Skinner, and can be understood via a brief exploration of the ‘skinner box.’ A mouse was placed in a box, and whenever the mouse conducted itself in a certain way it got either a reward or a punishment. In classical conditioning the individual doesn’t have to do anything to get the reward, they see the cloud and think of rain or smell grandma and expect cookies soon. However, in operant condition the subject must act in a certain way in order to obtain – or avoid – a certain outcome (Nairne).
The way this affects our discussion of certainty is obvious. Not only do people associate bad things with doubting, they remember the time they actively engaged in doubt and were punished. Perhaps an angry authority figure gave them a severe tongue lashing and took away some favored toy, or perhaps they voiced a belief that was unpopular at the institution where they were employed and were relieved of their position. If you beat a dog every time it barks it will quickly learn to be silent, and people are no different. If you kick a person – circumstantially, verbally, or physically – whenever they dissent with public opinion, it is not long until they realize how important it is to think and act in culturally appropriate methods.
The final factor of certainty we will be discussing is mental attitudes, and the specific example from this group we’ll be looking at is hope. Whenever people are hopeless they will convince themselves of the most obvious lies so they can at least mentally escape the horror of their circumstance. A good example of this is the mind of an Islamic suicide bomber.
It is a product of the classical conditioning conducted on us by our own society that we associate Muslims with terrorism. Most who practice Islam are moderate and kind people, but there are elements of their spiritual system that use religion as a tool of hate and death – just as the KKK uses Christianity.
It is easy to judge the men, women, and children who explode themselves, but if you step into their world you’ll see that even though it is a dreadful and destructive practice it is really quite understandable. They are immersed in a culture that values truth, purity, and goodness, and where many claim Western nations are the antithesis of these things. Knowing only what they have been told they do not know this is an inaccurate reflection, and due to the mechanisms of operant and classical conditioning once they are taken into a violent sub-culture they lose any sense of perspective and think its values to be those of Heaven. The most distressing part however is yet to come, because due to a low socio-economic status they are easily persuade to take up an unholy jihad against the west by corrupt imams – Islamic priests – who promise them paradise in return for an explosive demise among the infidels (Roberts).
Here we see the power of hope to convince the mind of things which are dubious at best. This world is harsh and cold, it is filled with death and disease, and humans languish at the wheel of civilization where they strive to eke out an existence. When one’s culture – or sub-culture – has taught them that there is a glorious world free of pain and death, where fear and suffering are never known, and that they can obtain it if they just put their head down and obey, it is no wonder people loathe questioning the claims of their society.
However, the above is just an exploration of one mental attitude; think about how other attitudes like love, revenge, and greed compel us to adhere to our current ways of thinking without question, even with compelling reasons to doubt are before us! How can I love my wife if I doubt her fidelity? How can I exact revenge when I realize how its object was manipulated by circumstances and authorities? How can I retain my greed when I behold the devastation it creates in the lives of others?
We now have before us the manner in which certainty is created, and why it is protected like life itself. Fear of change and punishment, comfort and hope for the future, social indoctrination, immersion and loss of perspective, as well as the fulfillment of life’s basic needs all combine to give us the strongest incentives to establish our conceptual foundation quickly and never look back.
It is easier and more comfortable to fool ourselves into thinking we have flawless answers for life’s big questions; certainty lets us skip the hard part – study and reflection – and dive into the sensuous joys of living. However, within every culture throughout all the ages of humanity there have existed wisdom traditions that perpetually whisper to us the errors in this type of thinking, and which call us forever deeper into the bottomless ocean of truth. Let these voices then be the ones that we heed, and let us make ourselves deaf to fear mongering fools. We all inherit certainty from our culture, but only the wise strive until it is converted into accurate knowledge.
Works Cited
“Certain”. Dictionary.com Dictionary.com. 2011. Web. 17 April 2011.
Dictionary.com is an easily accessible online dictionary that puts a plethora of linguistic resources at your fingertips. It has multiple dictionaries on one page so you can explore variances among definitions, a brief overview of the word’s history, a thesaurus, as well as famous quotations that demonstrate the manner in which the word is used.
Inside the Mind of a Suicide Bomber. Dir. Tom Roberts. A&E Home Video, 2006. Dvd.
A look at how the minds of those who are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice are groomed by those around. By showing the role of fear, shame, and group pressure in these scenarios it issues to all of us the imperative to critically analyze ourselves and our culture.
Nairne, James. Psycology. 5th ed. California: Wadsworth, 2011. Print.
A text book used to instruct people in the science of Psychology, this work reveals how personal identity is created, how the human senses work, the limits of those senses, and the role of genetic and environmental factors on how we think about, and relate to, the world and all that’s in it.
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