Believe and Disbelieve Nothing, or BADN for short, is a way of thinking that draws from past and present understandings and across cultures, combining ancient philosophical insight with current technical knowledge in such a way as to free people’s thinking from the divisive, socially- and psychologically-paralysing aspects of belief systems as a whole.
Human thinking, and even the brain itself, has gone through great transformation in terms of its capabilities and scope over countless ages of brutal survival, hard work, and life-altering discovery that has resulted in higher levels of awareness, cognition, education, creative expression and advanced technology.
Despite these advances, there is still a great amount of lingering centuries-old psychological noise in human thinking today, and as a species we find ourselves on a collision course with nature and with each other through cycles of division and detachment.
BADN is an attempt at addressing these issues by introducing a new philosophical discipline to public discussion; one that no longer relies on belief as its primary driving mechanism, and one that no longer leads to cycles of tribalistic divisiveness, the bottlenecking of our awareness as a species, and the formation of states of mind that set us against ourselves and each other – problems that our species has battled with throughout recorded history.
And while some will say that these problems are an unchanging characteristic of “Human Nature” itself, it is the claim here that the majority of unnecessary human struggle and suffering, social division and stagnation of personal growth experienced today, is actually the result of a collective set of philosophical and psycho-social problems that can be solved through the proposed set of changes to how we handle information and how we think of the world and one another.
A large majority of the challenges and struggles that face the human species come as a direct consequence of our own misdirected and otherwise erroneous thinking.
When we aren’t careful, our thinking can serve as the foundation on which all kinds of undesirable states of mind can be formed which then give rise to various general attitudes and outlooks within ourselves. Depending on which states of mind are nurtured, people can be led to behave in ways that are geared against themselves, or to shut down their greater awareness and turn them into cogs in the machine of some ideology or belief system.
Those who are conscious of the fact that personal and social problems need to be dealt with at their sources will often unexpectedly discover many of those sources within their own thinking, rather than, or as well as, in the thinking and behaviour of others.
Whether it results in someone misinterpreting or misjudging someone else and not being able to communicate with them as a result, or a self-proclaimed group of people dehumanising and waging war on another perceived group for some grand ideological purpose, the source can most-often be traced back to the same set of shared tendencies, patterns, and languages of thinking.
Many cultures, especially here in the West, have traditionally been raised to channel their efforts into the institution of politics when it comes to attempting to solve social problems, and into religious institutions when it comes to the personal. These institutions and all the conceptual reasoning that they are made from have been at the foundation of our social development since the beginning of recorded human history.
Now, as the world emerges into new and uncharted social conditions, it is becoming clear that our traditionally dominant institutions are no longer adequate for their stated social purposes. This isn’t to suggest they have nothing to offer – but that, in their current states under the compromising influences of belief, they are far more likely to confuse, mislead and divide people rather than lead them to any insight that gives rise to peace and unification.
Consequently, as individuals try to navigate this new world, many are running into personal problems where their thinking is concerned and interpersonal problems where their communication is concerned, and although it is usually overlooked, all these factors are somehow connected.
When it comes to our dominant social institutions, they are deserving of special attention. While it’s not the claim here that these institutions are the true source of our problems as a species, they are at the heart of the way our societies and cultures function, influencing the ways people think along with their speech and behaviour, as well as, in many cases, granting their agents authority over the interests, decisions and lifestyles of others.
Similar to the human species itself, these institutions have large, powerful vested interests in their own self-preservation. This goes double for institutions that grant power and wealth to their agents, as this motivates even the most well-meaning of regular people to move against anything that threatens the preservation of their lifestyles.
In a social context, the more obsolete the power-oriented institutions become, the more tyrannical lengths they are likely to go to in order to remain relevant and influential. This is further intensified with current and emerging technology, which empowers “the establishment” to silence, to ruin, and to end lives at the click of a button.
“Our political leaders are not put there to change things. They’re put there to keep things the way they are.”
Jacque Fresco
When it comes to our personal philosophies, or lack thereof, we bear heavy responsibilities and have serious decisions to make in terms of how we want to relate to the world and to all other people around us. We each have a choice to make; do we want to allow our greater human awareness to guide us into an unknown future with new states of mind and evolving outlooks, or do we want to submit ourselves to carrying on what came before us, submerging ourselves in what the people around us say and what those in the past have done to shape our historical ways of thinking?
Decisions such as these, and even the lens through which we inspect all relevant factors, are constantly blurred and misdirected by certain mechanisms within our thinking along with the social institutions around us that aim to prevent us from thinking for ourselves in order to preserve their sphere of influence. As a consequence of this, people are unusually receptive to, and are being systematically fed, closed-source, uncritical, tribalistic worldviews which were a natural outgrowth of, and a means to survival in, our old, divided world.
The claim is that, as times have moved on and our understandings of life have changed, the languages of thinking that underpin these institutions, while once socially conditioned into us to increase our chances of survival and success, are now bottlenecking our growth and maturation as a species. All of this will be explored in the following chapters.
On a positive note, more and more people each day are realising the need for a new way of thinking in order to relate more effectively with the world around them. They are taking on increasingly critical perspectives and approaches towards their own awareness, as opposed to merely thinking what they are told to think or what they would like to think. This could be because life has called on them to investigate through a series of increasingly serious events – mass political/civil unrest, Covid and climate fears, the breakdown of culture, weaponised mass migration, endless war, rampant censorship, two-tier policing and authoritarianism, etc. And it could, in part, be that the internet has enabled a much freer flow of information than was available to past generations and that this is a natural result.
Either way, as people become more critical, they are becoming less accepting of closed, fixed worldviews and belief-oriented ways of thinking. These types of thinking have been at the foundation of humanity for so long that it can take a lot of unlearning and relearning, and sometimes painful personal struggle, to break through, especially if they are going through it alone.
Now for the unfortunate part – the nature of our problem-solving institutions, specifically those that have vested interests in authority, is largely rooted in the same language of thinking as the historical conditioning that produces a great majority of our problem in the first place.
This makes it incredibly unlikely that people are able to sufficiently overcome certain problems, as all readily-available solutions are also contained within this institutionalised language of thinking and have the self-preservation mechanisms of belief built into them.
This can knock people off-course, directing their thinking into a kind of feedback loop, repeatedly replacing one opinion for another, one concept for another, one belief system for another, yet still ultimately operating under the same underlying language of thinking: belief.
This is what the BADN philosophical discipline seeks to provide an alternative to.
At some point in their lives, many people will be fortunate enough to have what they consider to be a kind of awakening, but which is, more often than not, actually just induction into a different ideological, belief-oriented state of mind; absorption of the talking points (and thinking points) necessary to pick a different side.
Many will have their awakening and the result will be joining or declaring support for some political party or another, or changing a view from For to Against, or adopting a new faith, not realising that they are tricking themselves into further blocking their own awareness and ensuring preservation of distorted ways of thinking and monolithic social institutions.
This same conditioning not only gives rise to a whole host of personal struggles when it comes to their thinking, but also sets the formation of cyclical mind states such as those associated with anxiety, depression, paranoia, resentment, grandiosity, among many others. On top of this, it can also lead to a number of problems related to behaviour and interaction, such as habitually clinging to ideas and identities, struggling to listen to others beyond the noise of one’s own interpretations, and an overwhelming, often involuntary tendency to reduce reality to mere confirmation of one’s own pre-existing thoughts.
These factors, among others, can make it incredibly difficult for people to communicate and to overcome their own psychological hurdles, and make it all too easy for them to wall themselves in based on arbitrary surface-level or ideological classifications and to build echo chambers on top of them.
“Most of our so-called research and reasoning merely consists of us finding arguments to go on believing as we already do.”
James Harvey Robinson
The way of thinking, or philosophical discipline, that will be presented in summary here is an attempt at contributing to solutions for these personal and social issues, along with a few others.
On an individual level, it is a new, or different, language of thinking that gears people’s psychological energies away from the mechanisms of belief and towards an open, far less restrictive and less self-preserving way of thinking. The aim is to realise new ways of thinking which enhance our awareness while regrounding people by forming a framework of interpretation that aligns with their personal insights and our greater human awareness, rather than with what they can be brought to believe or rationalise through conceptual rhetoric that is often designed to mask a lack of true understanding.
As well as the individual, it is the ambition of BADN to be suitable for all people, including self-proclaimed groups of people who have histories and long-standing allegiances with specific belief systems and institutions. It is the goal to offer a type of refuge for those who seek to move away from belief systems, but who also recognise a need to have something real and substantial to replace them with, and who don’t want to become apathetic.
The greatest transformations in lifestyle throughout the history of humanity, from hunters and gatherers to farmers (agricultural revolution) and from traditional crafts and manual trades to industrial engineers and mass manufacturers (industrial revolution) changed our way of relating to the world, albeit not always for the better, and have gained us countless revelations and insights into how nature works, and advanced methods of interacting with it in order to improve our lives.
Our rapid shift into the digital age is doing the same, and with increasing speed and efficiency as our knowledge and understanding grow.
It is the claim here that the conditions of this new era in our world call on us to take a conscious step towards preparing ourselves for not only the social revolutions that humanity will go through, but also for the revolutions of our own thinking. This means equipping ourselves with ways of thinking and states of mind that no longer shut down our curiosity or awareness in favour of comfort, identity, or preconceived beliefs, nor ones that give us reason to gatekeep truth, to divide humanity by arbitrary classifications, to make enemies out of each other through disagreements, nor any of the old trappings of belief-oriented languages of thinking.
“Revolutionary thinkers are not primarily gatherers of facts, but weavers of new intellectual structures”
Stephen Jay Gould
Believe and Disbelieve Nothing isn’t exactly a worldview and, contrary to common first attempts at dispute, it isn’t a belief system about believing nothing – it operates within a fundamentally different language of thinking than belief, opinion, and ideology.
Instead of endless battles of belief and all the conflict that arises out of them, what is sought here is a natural reunification of the species without superimposed authoritarian uniformity, without sacrificing personal individuality and freedom, and without malicious and misleading psychological interference.
This can be done through the discovery and development of an open-source, unifying discipline — a guiding mentality, which not only doesn’t discourage people from exploring certain thoughts or questions alone or through conversation, but actively encourages it.
Open-source means that the ‘source code’ of this philosophy is open for inspection and improvement by anyone, and that nothing is hidden in between the lines that anyone would need to gatekeep or misrepresent for reasons of power and personal gain. In fact, it’s part of the intention of this discipline to see to it that any such gatekeeping is no longer possible in our world.
It can be described in many ways, but really, it is little more than a way of thinking and a way of being.
Its stated goals:
(always subject to serious revision)
- To set the foundations that give rise for more opportunities for people to think deliberately and insightfully, so that their thinking is an empowering tool for them to use in their adult lives, rather than them becoming an eternal product of their thinking,
- To recognise that awareness, insight and wisdom are not unchanging, and as such, trying to think our way to truth based on old knowledge is impossible, and that belief systems, opinion and ideology are not only blinding to us due to the outdated language of thinking they inhabit, but that they also leave the species itself open to division and manipulation,
- To unify humanity through awareness and education that will inevitably break down all divisive ideology,
- To reach a place where we can consciously emerge into a new society capable of handling the massiveness of the modern world, more in-balance with nature and better aligned with current scientific understanding, without the need for further bloodshed.
All of this will be explored in the coming pages.
A couple of notes:
Thank you to Gordon Watton, whose conversations challenged my positions and who originally suggested I try to commit this to writing.
Also, I owe endless gratitude and respect to the late historian James Harvey Robinson for his work and for motivating my attempt at encapsulating this philosophy into words. What better way to show my gratitude than to rip some words right out of the introduction of his book Mind in the Making (first printed in 1921):
“If some magical transformation could be produced in men’s ways of looking at themselves and their fellows, no inconsiderable part of the evils which now afflict society would vanish away or remedy themselves automatically. If the majority of influential people held the opinions and occupied the point of view that a few rather uninfluential people now do, there would, for instance, be no likelihood of another great war; the whole problem of “labour and capital” would be transformed and attenuated; national arrogance, race animosity, political corruption, and inefficiency would all be reduced below the danger point. As an old Stoic proverb has it, people are mostly tormented by the ways they think of things, rather than by the things themselves. This is eminently true of many of our worst problems today. We have available knowledge and ingenuity and material resources to make a far fairer world than that in which we find ourselves, but various obstacles prevent our intelligently availing ourselves of them.
When we contemplate the shocking derangement of human affairs which now prevails in most civilized countries, including our own, even the best minds are puzzled and uncertain in their attempts to grasp the situation. The world seems to demand a moral and economic regeneration which is dangerous to postpone, but as yet impossible to imagine, let alone direct. We have unprecedented conditions to deal with and novel adjustments to make — there can be no doubt of that. We also have a great stock of scientific knowledge unknown to our grandfathers with which to operate. So novel are the conditions, so copious the knowledge, that we must undertake the arduous task of reconsidering a great part of the opinions about Man and his relations to his fellow-men which have been handed down to us by previous generations who lived in far other conditions and possessed far less information about the world and themselves.“
The book is short and worth the few hours it’ll take to devour it. Download it here for free.
He wrote:
“The world seems to demand a moral and economic regeneration which is dangerous to postpone, but as yet impossible to imagine…”
Challenge accepted.