Spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years in the coldness and blindness of wild survival all but guaranteed that the human species got off to a troublesome start. Developing our ability to think under these conditions, previously knowing only the most basic survival functionality, was no exception to this fact. Still dealing with the violence, scarcity and deprivation throughout nature, we began to strategically gauge ourselves and our world bit by bit.
As our awareness of the complexities of life became more detailed and we began to really think, and as our socialised lives emerged into novel conditions, the human brain itself was forced through a series of incredible transformations. Much like a species of new-born children with brains in the earliest stages of development, not only were the contents of our knowledge increasing and unconsciously being improved on, but our brains themselves were growing, reshaping and reorganising themselves to give us better ways of handling that knowledge.
These developments have seen us grow from an impulsive species with sheltered, isolated perspectives to a species with the ability to think critically and to form informed, connected, insightful worldviews, along with scores of psychological tools to aid us in overcoming life’s challenges without resorting to brutality.
This is human awareness and understanding in action. This seemingly never-ending process of influence and change is evident on the surface of our world, where our social structures, our transportation, our methods of producing the necessities of life, our means of communication and sharing information and so on, have undergone revolutions in functions and appearance.
Human thinking, coupled with the ability to learn real, functional truths, has had a direct impact on the way we relate to the world around us.
It’s within living memory for all but the younger generations as of 2025 to have grown up with communication heavily restricted to the local and national levels, and with information that travelled slowly and had been filtered through many corporate, political and religious systems of interpretation and censorship before it was admitted into the public consciousness.
With the advent of the internet and home computing, instant communication and the sharing of information, along with the rise in new forms of media, many of these natural and artificial restrictions were outgrown and otherwise rendered weak and ineffective, and any remnants of them that still operate today stand out as ancient modes of social control desperately trying to claw back what power they once had over human thinking.
As individuals, and as a species, we have witnessed countless revolutions of education, technology and lifestyle, and we are only just beginning to see and understand the impacts of these changes.
These are just a few simplified examples that go to show how human thinking and action can influence the emergence of new conditions around us, which in turn feed back into creating further change in the ways we interact with the world, each other, and our own minds.
As with most revolutionary psychological and technical changes, a feedback loop has been established and has become a functioning part of how we live.
The world around us today would look barely recognisable up against how it looked a hundred, a thousand, or tens of thousands of years ago. The same can be said for our behaviours, attitudes and ways of thinking, for it was not long ago that we were classing people as witches and burning them at the stake, murdering children in a vain effort to control the weather and influence crop harvests, and eating the dismembered bodies of our enemies in order to absorb their strength.
From all that we were to all we’ve become and onwards to everything we will grow into, the transformation of our awareness and capabilities as a species shows no sign of ending. For better and for worse, it will continue to impact the changes that our brains adapt to and, hence, how we live.
As positive as many of these changes are, there are still a lot challenges facing us, many of which have their roots in old habits, conditioned tendencies, restrictive thinking, and ancient aspects of the human condition that we have still not managed to truly overcome.
For example, our species is still gripped by age-old cycles of personal stagnation and insecurity, psychological and ideological capture and all the social fragmentation that occurs because of it, the gatekeeping of truth, cultural lag, needless interpersonal conflict, tribalistic desire for social control, and a whole host of other conditions that go some ways to ensure continual unnecessary deprivation and oppression – all of which there is a wealth of wisdom available to us that could aid us in overcoming were it not for the fact that it is overlooked by an unfortunate majority of people in favour of carrying on life’s traditionalised daily absurdities.
These cycles of human struggle and all the states of mind and behavioural complexes they have produced have become so deeply embedded in the ways our personalities and societies function that they are not just accepted as a norm that we can observe, but by many deemed to be a hardcoded aspect of “Human Nature” itself, and, consequentially, it’s just the way things are.
Grand theories about human beings being naturally selfish, greedy, controlling, violent and destructive are understandable when considering our cold, bloody, brutal history, and how easily and impulsively – some might say primally – large numbers of people readily slip back into old patterns of thinking and behaviour in certain situations.
But as time has gone on and our insight into behavioural and psychological influence has grown, the realisation is beginning to set in that a blanket view of humanity being a fixed way just doesn’t square with reality; that all sorts of varying sets of behaviours can be brought to the surface as new “norms” within cultures and societies so long as the conditions that give rise to them are in place.
There is no species on the planet with behaviours and states of mind more malleable, more prone to influence, than our own.
Losing sight of this only leaves us without a tool. After all, if the destruction and divisiveness we’re experiencing today is “just the way it is” and that’s “how people are built” then logically it follows that it’s pointless to even bother examining causes of behaviour or any alternatives to what we consider our default, fixed state.
If the prevailing belief among humanity is that we are this way because we have always been this way, and that that’s all there is, then we are instantly disarmed against our collective failure to overcome the stains on our history and are doomed to add to them.
When it comes to our cycles of suffering and their causes, it’s the goal here to frame these behaviours and social complexes as the direct result of a clash between a combination of natural human ignorance along with the ancient childlike tendencies of our minds, against a mind that seeks greater awareness and connection in order to function in our massively interconnected modern world.
Despite the differences in how we may speak, our ancient language of thinking, common across most, if not all, cultures, is defined by belief, and the world that is emerging today is one of awareness, insight and understanding, and requires us to shed certain historical states of mind in order to allow new, better-adapted ones to form.
The main hurdles of the emergence of these new ways of thinking are, of course, the outdated devices and movements of our current language of thinking. This is why you see certain belief-oriented groups claiming to transcend divisiveness conceptually, but in practice, feeding back into states of mind and social institutions that produce these divisions in the first place.
That’s where Believe and Disbelieve Nothing becomes relevant, because it is, as far as I can tell, the only way to give rise to these new states of mind naturally, voluntarily and without relying on brainwashing, violence, or authoritarian imposition.
In the past, before humanity started amassing information, and even then dealing with painfully slow communication, a belief-oriented language of thinking was pretty much the only option for interpreting this world through. The primary reason for that is that belief is a language of thinking that can be defined and upheld by thinking alone.
This creates a seemingly self-evident, circular, self-reinforcing psychological structure that often supersedes reality due to our attachments to it and acts as a filter through which we interpret everything.
Not only were belief systems in general, and a belief-based language of thinking as a whole, two of our only options, but it seems to have been all we were capable of as a species in the infancy of its newly-developed ability to think. Our common understanding of ourselves and our world was low and our tendency towards survival spurred on by primal fear encouraged us to fill in the blanks of our not-knowing with whatever we could imagine.
These were the early years of human awareness, and with what we can trace and what little we know about life before thinking, life before language, it can be characterised and defined by certain behaviours and themes closer to the survival of wild animals than with civilised, modern human life. That is, until we started to think.
A great majority of our history is that which predates our ability to think, and it is this majority of our pre-conscious awareness history that conditioned our earliest languages of thinking, and is still, in many ways, active within a great majority of people to this day.
Then, after we started to think, uncountable years would have passed before we started to really understand. Realising this, it should come as no surprise that there has always been a disconnect and a clash between the two; that our thinking has often been in conflict with our desire for awareness and with what can be understood, especially since we’ve had so much invested in it due to it being our first language of conscious thinking.
The earliest conscious attempts at understanding, as seen in ancient Greece, were both drowned in the limitations of this earlier language of thinking and conditioned, unlike ourselves today, by the fact that they had no great history of information to rely on.
They were the pioneers, completely unguided in utilising their thinking in quests for understanding, and who recognised that, since they had no information to rely on, they had to find it and to form it. This explains, at least in part, the mismatch between the desired rigor of their experimentation and the flimsy, superstitious, mythological and belief-based grounds which gave rise to their questions.
Here’s a small passage from James Harvey Robinson’s Mind in the Making:
“The Greek thinkers had all agreed in looking for salvation through intelligence and knowledge. But eloquent leaders arose to reveal a new salvation, and over the portal of truth they erased the word “Reason” and wrote “Faith” in its stead, and the people listened gladly to the new prophets, for it was necessary only to believe to be saved, and believing is far easier than [understanding.]”
The word JHR actually uses at the end there is “thinking.” I replaced it with “understanding” to emphasise the difference between understanding and thinking, as belief is a device of thinking, and understanding transcends what we think and believe. I could have just as easily replaced it with “gaining insight.”
Belief itself has been crucial in helping us navigate through a world with just enough basic understanding of its processes for survival and forming the first tribal societies, but the human mind of today can’t be considered the same thing as the prehistoric brain that gave rise to the language of belief, and our ways of interacting with the world have been transformed as an observable result of this reality.
We have gone from a historical natural ignorance of certain facts about the nature of reality to now having to play catch-up with the overwhelming, impossible amount of information, insight and understanding that is now available to us.
This reality exposes a critical flaw in the notion that we can base our lives and our world on what we believe – namely, that the conditions of our world and the totality of human awareness is developing faster than any one person or one group’s thinking can capture, and that if it were even possible for such a capture to be legitimate, it would require a wealth of insight, wisdom, and deep understanding about life.
Therefore, encouraging individual people to assume a belief-based language of thinking is to set them up with a lifetime of obstacles that block their emerging awareness, and on top of that, basing society itself on belief invariably knocks us all back a few steps behind current understanding, leaving us far more likely to become destructive under the influence of the blanket, uninformed views of the past.
This is what various students of human behaviour call Cultural Lag. Though it will, to some extent, always be the case that we will be in a state of catch-up, our psychological energies have been directed in such a way as to assure that we remain so unaware that we would rather default to the prehistoric language of belief rather than to face the potentially unsettling state of not-knowing.
Under these conditions, society becomes distracted from its striving for civilisation and living peacefully and its energies are co-opted in fragmented states along lines of shared beliefs and the movements and conflicts of the institutions. And, given the sprawling, self-preserving, all-encompassing nature of our beliefs, and despite how people may personally feel about it, individuals, families and society itself find themselves dragged in and indoctrinated, sentenced to deliberately limit their own awareness in order to preserve the division, the hierarchies and the oppression of their misled beliefs and the social institutions that spawn out of them.
Here, on the point of division, it’s important to note that it’s commonly recognised that, for every belief, there’s an opposition. Therefore, to organise our societies based on belief and ideology instantly and inherently divides that society, effectively producing our own social fragmentation and making it necessary to base our cultures on peer-pressure and indoctrination with half-assed propaganda — non-answers, and answers that kill the curiosity behind genuine questions in order to stop them exposing any flaws and to bring people in-line.
Any sincere critical questioning of a belief might just lead to people abandoning that belief in favour of whatever truth is or isn’t beneath it. After all, where there is understanding, there is no more room for belief, and in societies rooted in belief, it is often deemed better for people to believe than to understand.
The intention of BADN is not to get lost in the shortcomings of the human mind operating under belief, nor in the opposite tendency of endlessly singing its praises while acting like there’s no work left to be done. If a decent balance can be struck here, and if awareness of the shortcomings of human thinking can come pre-built in to our perceptions, it would help in making sure that we do not raise ourselves and each other as lifelong servants of our own thinking, or, more importantly, that of someone else.
And while the human mind is now capable of critical thinking and understanding its way out of problems, it has historically been largely conditioned by a specific set of characteristics that directly pit us against these enlightening functions.
This takes many forms, like the casual tendency of people to believe what they think just because they are the ones who think it, or on a deeper level, the mind’s ability to form functioning belief systems where one concept is defined and validated by another without any interaction with, or feedback from, the natural world.
It is characteristics such as these which predispose people to identifying with their thinking and setting them up to resist insights outside of that thinking in favour of comforting, often traditionalised, preconceived perspectives.
And it’s the point of BADN as a discipline to recognise these characteristics as largely obsolete and to attempt to provide a practical way of overcoming them.
What sets belief apart as a distinct language of thinking is a set of characteristics that are intrinsic to this particular movement of our minds. These characteristics are not restricted to belief, but they are defining features of it. Therefore, wherever belief operates, no matter what the surface may present itself as, the same set of characteristics will be operating and influencing outcomes.
BADN is about taking a hyper-critical handling of not only individual belief systems, but the underlying functions, directions and movements beneath them; the tendencies of believing in our minds. And the reason for taking such a hyper-critical approach is because belief has been dominant in human history ever since we developed the ability to think, and now look at the world around you – it has a lot to answer for, if only the right questions were being asked.
One of the most dominant characteristics of belief is its self-preserving nature. That is that belief systems themselves inherently function in a way that keep themselves going. To be able to believe something, a believer must affirm it and do whatever they can to keep the belief alive, even going as far as to deny uncomfortable, challenging thoughts and criticisms, and in many cases going out of their way to avoid anything that may threaten that belief.
This generally results in a world of people who do what they can to prove their beliefs right, and, by necessity, to reject scrutiny and criticism where it is not desired. This often takes the form of wilful ignorance, deflection, oppressive censorship, or the utilisation of false, belief-oriented logic in order to explain away this criticism.
“Most of our so-called research and reasoning merely consists of us finding argumentsto go on believing as we already do.”
James Harvey Robinson
This immediate understandable resistance to scrutiny leads people to become far less likely to stress-test or actively try to disprove their deeply held beliefs, and many become uncomfortable and defensive when their beliefs are challenged, especially when it’s something they hold close to their identities and self-image or when it’s a belief they can use to extract some form of social control over others.
After all, nobody is actively believing in anything they consciously know to be false – then, the belief is either insincere or there is no belief at all.
The problem, then, is that as we become more invested in our beliefs and sacrifice our self-awareness to make way for new identities and self-images based on them, this gives us enough reason to avoid and to gatekeep any glimpse of raw, unfiltered truth, both from ourselves and from others, as truth can not be contained and controlled within a belief-based narrative and may threaten its preservation.
Trying to prove your beliefs wrong might be beneficial to you as a living being but it’s an obvious threat to the perpetuation of the beliefs themselves, and depending on how deeply the beliefs have taken root, and given that there is a separation between ourselves as living beings and what we think of ourselves, some people would rather sacrifice their lives than to have what they believe and their ego-identities be called into question.
Although many belief systems, in some form or another, present themselves as truth or as the result of serious study and critical awareness, the self-preserving characteristics of belief actually reject such critical awareness due to their sheltering, protective nature, empowered by the farcical assumptions that the belief is a necessary feature of the person who believes it and that it is a personal insult to question it.
This is a revealing characteristic of the false nature of belief as a whole; that, generally speaking, it must present itself as something more than it actually is, employing endless layers of linguistic tricks in our thinking and forcing us to rest on many silent assumptions in order to preserve our beliefs.
“The greatest enemy of truth is not the lie; it is the belief that you’ve already found it”
Unknown
The tendency to reject and to avoid anything that may prove our beliefs wrong, or even going as far as to call for censorship or the banning of criticism and different ideas, can most probably be found within each of us at some point in our lives whenever the language of belief has been active in our thinking, and there’s no doubt it can be recognised in the world around us, across cultures and throughout the ages.
And this self-preserving, self-affirming influence is especially prevalent when people accept a belief system they don’t fully believe, yet which seems self-evident once certain other concepts and silent assumptions are in place. These elements create a logical framework that acts as a kind of proof, leading them to accept what they were once rightfully unsure of – allowing the belief system to define itself as obvious and indisputable to varying degrees without any interaction with nature.
This is true not only in humanity’s most sheltered, closed-minded beliefs, but is still an active central influence within the global majority.
To top it all off, this tendency towards self-preservation creates an angle on which individuals can betray their better judgment, and on which gatekeepers and malicious people can divide societies, create and magnify the insecurities of individuals, and paralyse people’s intellectual growth, curiosity and creativity in order to direct their thinking.
This can be done easily by convincing someone that they’ve finally found the truth, or that truth can be discovered behind some ideology or cause – all they need to do is stick with it and believe in it, to side with the group and declare allegiance to it. As far as they’re concerned, they’re now on the right side of history or the right side of the afterlife, or whatever else they’re being promised.
The kinds of defensive reactions we are met with, or that we might exhibit ourselves, when beliefs are challenged, can also be seen as very telling about some of the ways we’re mishandling our ability to think.
There are ways of thinking and ways of being that don’t create these clashes, and don’t evoke fear of personal humiliation and breakdown over the notion of discovering truth.
Related to, and supportive of, the self-affirming, self-preserving nature of belief are the self-replicating and divisive natures of our concepts themselves. Not only do we struggle with the handling of our ability to think — we struggle most with the devices and objects of our thinking.
When our beliefs and ideologies define our personal identities, it is all-too-easy to perceive a personal attack out of the disagreement of others. Not only does the belief lose its original potential focus on truth, but is now somehow interested in personal validation and other ego-interests through having others readily agree, rather than exploring and questioning the reasoning behind it.
This instantly creates the need to seek validation from others in order for the belief to appear to function in the world around us. This can take many forms, as in the cases of grand social movements that won’t hear of anything except agreement, or in smaller cases such as family households that follow certain religious or political ways of thinking.
With this motivation to get the nod from others, a division is instantly created between those who share the belief and those who don’t, and the world today is full of evidence of the sharing and iron-fisted enforcement of ancient self-preserving belief systems, and in spite of any good intentions the crusaders of these beliefs may have had, the division and destruction that has been wrought as a consequence of them is still at the bottom of the great majority of unnecessary suffering and psychological stagnation in the world today.
The deliberate shutting down of our own awareness in favour of upholding currently held beliefs is unlikely to ever remain a personal thing. In explaining their perspectives to others, believers and disbelievers alike need to go to some lengths to conceal the flaws in their reasoning, and this is why many people have an instant tendency to project misleading verbal abstractions in order to control other people’s thinking, because this, when successful, forms a protective circle through the development of a belief-oriented tribalism.
All too often, this results in authoritarian figures and institutions seeking to capture the minds of those around them through deception and demands.
Either way, the division, delusion, closed-mindedness, manipulation and oppression that the belief-oriented language of thinking has given rise to threatens us on every level from the personal to the interpersonal.
Upon recognising all this, it is the ultimate claim here that the only way to truly put these problems to rest is to believe and disbelieve nothing. As will be explored, this may well be the only way to pull ourselves up from the blindness of natural ignorance and to enable ourselves to think critically by forming states of mind capable of handling uncomfortable truths.
The intention of the Believe and Disbelieve Nothing philosophical discipline is to form the basis of a guiding set of insights for a language of thinking that can not give rise to belief systems, guided by the natural philosophical awareness that belief systems are self-contained devices of our thinking – in other words, they are an ancient habitual abuse of our ability to think, and they have us captured in cycles of naively trying to wrap reality up in our imaginations, interpreted through inadequate, primitive language.
Unlike belief with its divisive, socially-fragmenting imperatives, awareness and common understanding have a unifying imperative. And so, even though we are living in the Age of Information, the destructive brutality we see around us today is the natural dramatic consequence of allowing belief to run so central to our day to day lives and to how all our different societies function.
Whether you speak English, Urdu, Chinese, Polish, etc., people are almost always operating under the shared characteristics of a belief-oriented language of thinking. This is seen as being so naturally self-evident as the ‘default’ state of mind, so masterfully embedded in our silent assumptions and so dominant across the world that there is very little consideration as to its validity and whether or not alternatives are possible and practical.
BADN is an attempt to see to it that an emerging alternative is available and accessible to larger numbers of people.
This is about attempting a conscious upgrade of the language of our thinking, partly by constant recognition of the errors of the past, and otherwise by rebuilding the broken pieces of our perspectives where belief once dominated — while being guided not to attempt to rebuild in the very same language of belief.
If the human mind is not limited in terms of its breadth or depth, or if certain states of mind can be created and preserved, then alternatives can too – we just need to discover and to develop them.
Through this conscious upgrade, we will attempt to see to it that the age of belief is over, gone with the curiosity-crushing, species-fracturing attitudes and ideologies that it will eventually be known for. And if we can’t see to it that the world follows suit, we can at least live this reality in our own personal lives and reap its benefits.
Previous: Chapter 2: Thought and Thinking
Next: Chapter 4: The Scientific Method