Could I Be Wrong? Could You Be Wrong?

We hurt each other through our opinions

I remember the first time I drove a car. It was one of those joyful evenings when my parents hadn’t gone to work. My uncle who must have been in his early 20s at that time was home as well.

We (my uncle and I) had little in common but the strongest bond that kept us together was our unspoken love for cars. Even if we were a full decade apart in age, we found a common interest in the joy of driving.

My uncle got all the fun though. I was only 10 years old so I would only drive vicariously through him.

This particular evening was different though. Like always, he had asked my dad to let him take the car out in the yard for a wash. He called me to help him wash but I don’t think I was very helpful as I was only there to sniff the dust that was coming off the car. (A weird extension of my soil eating habit that I have written about already).

Anyway, once “we” were done washing the car, my uncle joked about how I should take it back into the garage. He tossed the keys to me, and my sister who was watching the whole thing quickly ran towards my uncle and held him back as she dared me to drive it.

What they never knew is that I had mentally rehearsed how to drive a stick shift for several years. I had carefully observed what the operations were and I had occasionally asked what the meanings of certain maneuvers were.

These questions were few and far between, they were also directed to several people to eliminate suspicion. This time was the only chance I had to apply all this theory.

I quickly jumped into the driver's seat and started the maneuvers the best way I knew. The car jerked a bit at first and that's when I realized I was not in neutral. I quickly corrected my mistake and switched on the engine.

My uncle was now furious but my sister had pushed her far. By the time he got to the car, I had already shifted to the first gear and drove it a few feet before stopping and running out.

Skipping all the slaps and kicks I got for my buffoonery, the experience of driving at that age left me with questions.

This was the first time I was exposed to the idea that someone could have very strong convictions about something and still be wrong. All the time I spent theorizing about how to drive a car was not close to reality.

There are convictions that I had, theories that I thought were true for sure when it came to driving a car but those same statements fell apart as false when I started driving that car that day.

That new reality scared my 10-year-old mind but it cemented the way I approach life and the theories in it.

Currently, my writing journey on this platform is another time in my life that I have been forced to re-examine my belief systems.

I write a lot about issues concerning human wellbeing. I try to dive deeper and explore ideas that I think can be useful. Quite frankly, I have found comfort in almost all the ideas I share and I have found most of them to be useful as well. But this question never goes away.

Unlike driving a stick shift vehicle, there are probably no definite ways of dealing with life. What I find useful may totally be irrelevant to a lot of people.

I keep writing and cringing at each word I write except those that are backed by some research. I keep thinking to myself that there is someone out there who reads what I write and thinks to themselves that I must be the biggest fool they’ve ever seen.

And I know that this is probably a lot of impostor syndrome that plagues almost everyone but to me, it is also a brake of sorts that helps me examine the validity of my claims.

I do not like absolute statements. Especially when those statements oppress people’s will to live. That is why I have not been in a catholic church for over 9 years now and why I distanced myself from all forms of organized religion.

I have always found some hope in my catholic religion, I love the peace that it gave me and the simplicity with which I could use its teaching to navigate my world.

But when I started asking questions after my expulsion from the seminary, I found that my identity rejected some parts of the faith and most of those had been forced into my belief systems through Christian dogma.

For a long time, I coasted in a place of no belief, lost and scared but also with an ever freeing feeling.

In India, I got introduced to other belief systems and religions outside my Christian one. Most of them provided a lot of the answers that I thought Christianity didn’t.

I, therefore, started leaning more into them. LOA, spiritual meditations, Hindu enlightenment, philosophies, channeled teachings, and so on.

But lately, I am questioning everything again. I am questioning whether or not they are valid. My doubt is mostly stemmed from how most people use these practices to take advantage of other people.

These people teach the prosperity gospel, LOA teachings, wealth creation, and so on, and seem to offer hope to people. But they seem to just be taking advantage of people just as much as if not more than what organized religions do.

Back of all human endeavors lies hope. That one enduring feeling that keeps us pushing forward even when times are hard.

And it’s this feeling that keeps people hooked to belief systems that hurt them. And I would also like to argue that hope is part of the feelings that cause other people to take advantage of others — Knowingly, or unknowingly.

Hope helps us build stories. Stories with which we can cultivate powerful and hopefully virtuous dispositions.

My doubts come close to despair and further away from confidence.

But the mark of a hopeful disposition is closer to confidence and further away from despair.

Therefore someone might say I am losing hope simply because I am losing confidence in beliefs that hurt people.

I want to believe that the law of attraction works, but I don’t want to see people suffer and just dismiss their pain as a misuse of the law.

I want to believe that hard work and discipline will get you to where you want to be in life, but I don’t want to dismiss the efforts of those who are struggling as being lazy and indisciplined.

And it's not as if these belief systems benefit the majority. It’s quite the opposite. It is often the LOA coach who will make all the money. The practitioners will be miles miserable.

Even the so-called hard work concentrates the sought-after resources in the possessions of a few people, the irony being that in most industries, the hard workers are not the highest earners, in fact, most of them struggle to even make ends meet. Therefore, what is hard work?

In my writing, I have often written about things I feel strongly about and they often sound like absolute statements. The very thing I hate.

I recently wrote an article about listicles, but how do I know that they are not useful to other people.

Like most of my work, reading that article again just feels like I am projecting my fears and biases onto other people.

I can’t tell you how crippling it is for me to speak to my wildly attractive neighbor, we have never spoken a word to each other apart from accidental eye contact, or how I can’t get myself to text people that I badly and desperately want to talk to all day and night, yet here I am making absolute statements about relationships.

In regards to Aristotle’s work, he says, the coward then is a despairing sort of person, for he fears everything. The brave man on the other hand has the opposite disposition, for confidence is the mark of a hopeful disposition.

Does it mean that all my cautious despair and crippling fear all come together to make me a coward then?

Is all this talk of human wellbeing nothing but a coward’s disguise in building stories that can support his limited belief systems?

When we speak of hope, my frailing hopeful disposition is contrasted by the confidence and seemingly healthy hopeful disposition of those that are rooted in their beliefs.

Maybe it is your guru or your favorite role model, or a genius in business. When these people speak, they too speak in absolutes. But if what they are teaching does not work for most people, how do they know that they are right?

People suffer as they cling to vines of hope because we keep telling them that this is the way things are when it comes to life.

Like I was before I drove that car that day, we theorize about what we think life must be like. Based on these theoretical perspectives, we go further to tell others what they must do with their lives to have improved life conditions.

They try this advice out and it never works in reality. But then more advice keeps flowing in.

I think people who push absolute statements and stick by them at all costs are either deluded or crazy. I think the former applies to most people. If you still believe that only those that accept Jesus will go to heaven regardless of their religion, and you stand by that, you are probably deluded.

This is because the cognitive dissonance that results from holding an absolute belief in the presence of other equally powerful beliefs requires one to be deluded or else risk running mad.

If you further use that belief to take advantage of fellow believers or punish those that don’t believe, how do you live with yourself?

I think it's important to realize that probably none of us knows anything for sure. It’s important to realize that our stars might not know anything for sure. They may provide us with unique perspectives but just like other perspectives, their perspectives are only useful as points of consideration.

A point of consideration should not be taken as an absolute statement at the expense of other points of consideration.

We can approach life knowing that what we think we know for sure might not be so and that’s ok. We keep trying stuff until we find the ones that work for us. This way, maybe, hopefully, a lot fewer people will be hurt by following shallow perspectives packaged as absolute beliefs.

We could be wrong.

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