When Opinion Becomes Religion: The Transformative Outcome of Giving Up Opinions

“You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can’t control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

People assume you agree with them when you don’t argue. When I decided to stop sharing my opinion for a month, I didn’t set out to make it a social experiment. I was looking to invest in an exercise for self-development. I wanted to really listen to people, instead of just waiting for a chance to tell them my opinion. I also wanted to work on persuading myself that I am less important than I naturally think I am. It sounds funny to say it, what with all the noise about how fabulous we all are, but my aim was to practice one of the least appreciated and most difficult virtues — humility.

Pride and Shame vs. Humility and Gratitude

The opposite of humility is pride. These days you don’t hear much about how pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Although the traditional seven deadly sins were marketed by the Roman Catholic Church starting in the fourth century, they have been part of our collective consciousness for much longer. One scholar claims their astrological origin was in Hellenistic Greece. But I’m going to hazard a guess that these “sins” have been an obstacle to spiritual people since we ate of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, metaphorically speaking, of course.

And pride is number one on the list, after which comes greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. But I’m just going to deal with pride here, and its remedy, humility.

Humility and pride are two extremes of the same concept, they are not two different things. We are all situated somewhere on the scale, as with all opposites. In modern American society, and Western society in general, pride is being promoted as a virtue. It even gets its own parades.

We love to sneer at the sensibilities of the past, dismissing them as priggish and stuffy, even downright wrong. But the perils of excessive pride are found in the mythology of every culture and religion since the deluge. The entire epic of the Odyssey rests upon Odysseus having too much pride to escape the cyclops without shouting his name to the monster he’d just blinded as he and his men were escaping. But the cyclops happened to have a pretty well-placed father, and when the monster tattled on Odysseus for blinding him with a stake, the god of the sea made the hero’s trip home a real bitch.

If warnings about pride thrived within a culture that didn’t bat an eye over naked boy gymnastics or any of the resulting socially acceptable older man/adolescent boy homosexuality, we’re going to have to agree that avoiding pride is not just a tenet of any puritanical worldview. This wisdom has persisted independent of religion. Yet in one generation of feasting on pride we have become so bloated as to disregard the insight of countless generations too rotten to sample.

“No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.” Will and Ariel Durant, “The Lessons of History”

Like most ideas that create more problems than the one it was meant to solve, promoting pride was done with good intentions. The problem is we’ve confused humility with shame, and pride as the antidote, when shame is actually a byproduct of pride.

“Pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source. True humility is the only antidote to shame.” Uncle Iroh, “Avatar: The Last Airbender”

It has become almost impossible to escape the noise of commercials and public service billboards and teachers and politicians insisting we cultivate ever greater pride. We should be proud of the color of our skin, proud of the kind of people we like to have sex with, proud of taking hormones or cutting off our boobs. But when we have been blown up with this inflated sense of pride, we can’t help but suspect that we can’t measure up to how great we are supposed to be, and in comes shame.

Pride inflates our egos, inevitably creating at worst a sense of arrogant superiority and at the least a feeling of separateness from those not included in our particular pride group. Rather than promoting such a self-destructive quality, we should be encouraging gratitude for our privileges. There is no scarcity of research on the importance of gratitude for our psychological and even physical well-being. According to the two scientists who have done much of the research on gratitude, Dr. Robert A. Emmons of the University of California, Davis, and Dr. Michael E. McCullough of the University of Miami, in their study An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life,

“Gratitude, like other positive emotions, broadens the scope of cognition and enables flexible and creative thinking, it also facilitates coping with stress and adversity… Gratitude not only makes people feel good in the present, but it also increases the likelihood that people will function optimally and feel good in the future.”

Pride, no matter how amazing we think our attribute or privilege is, offers none of these benefits. It’s marketed as a way to improve our self-esteem, but in reality, it makes us insecure. Deep down we are all smarter than the lie, we all share that same calling toward Truth, toward the mystery of existence, so pride sits uneasily within us. We’re all at different places in our journey, so there will naturally be different levels of discomfort with pride, but the more pride makes you consciously unhappy, the more advanced you are becoming. Discomfort is a good thing. Without it there is no growth.

The late great comedian George Carlin did a hilarious bit on pride. Proud to be an American. Proud to be black. Proud to be Irish. No group was spared. He found it particularly ridiculous to be proud of attributes that were accidents of birth.

“I don’t understand this notion of ethnic pride. ‘Proud to be Irish,’ ‘Puerto Rican pride,’ ‘Black pride.” It seems to me pride should be reserved for accomplishments; things you attain or achieve, not things that happen to you by chance… You wouldn’t say I’m proud to have a pre-disposition for colon cancer.”

So replacing pride with appreciation for the aspects of your life that happen by chance is a great place to start practicing gratitude. With enough exercise, gratitude can even start replacing pride in areas of our lives where our actions did play a role in our accomplishments. And at a certain point, gratitude becomes such a habit that we start finding it everywhere, even in the struggles we have faced in life, especially in the struggles.

Ok. Got it. Gratitude good. Pride bad. But what’s this all got to do with humility, and not offering my own opinion when someone says something I disagree with? Fair question. I knew there was no way I’d be able to stop whoring my opinions around without getting a handle on my pride. It’s that sense of self importance that compels me to ensure my superior opinions are heard.

Benjamin Franklin knew the struggle well. In his concise and fascinating little autobiography, he explains how he identified 13 cardinal virtues. At the end of every day, he wrote down all the instances he was able to practice those virtues. Even for a man who put great effort into practicing virtue, he found it impossible to get rid of pride.

“There is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive. Even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.”

And that, my friends, is why humility is such a party pooper (and why it is the last concept that needs encouragement). In attempting to practice humility by not arguing with people, I ran the risk of feeling proud when I accomplished my goal. So I reworded my goal. Instead of wanting to practice humility, I wanted to practice not having an opinion about everything. We don’t often realize that the option exists, but I knew all my life I’d been surrounded by people swollen with opinions, it might be interesting to try to be a person that didn’t have a lot of opinions.

Separation of Self and Opinion

Mark Twain would have been proud. Ever mistrustful of the swarm, he famously said “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” Is there a greater majority than those of us who construct our pedestals of our opinions? We pierce our precious lawns with signs broadcasting our opinions to our neighbors who probably never asked. We drape ourselves in shirts and hats to ensure our opinions travel with us. And just in case the thousands of strangers we pass on the 405 every morning were wondering, we slather our opinions all over the bumpers of our cars.

One might begin to suspect we take great pride in our opinions, maybe, that we even mistake who we truly are with our opinions. So what does that mean for everyone who doesn’t share my opinion? When I drive by another human being with a bumper sticker advertising the opposite opinion of my bumper sticker, do I automatically dislike that person, even, maybe, hate them a little? Do I feel superior with my better opinion? We all know the answer to those questions. It seems pretty clear that all these opinions create feelings of pride, superiority and hatefulness. And for what benefit?

Perhaps we want to change the world. If enough people share my opinion, we can make changes that will make the world better. That’s fair. But whatever benefit to this “world” we want to improve with our opinions will be cancelled out by the pride, superiority and hatefulness seated in the hearts of those living in this supposed better world. Many a sage would argue the greatest benefit we can offer the world is the cultivation of true compassion in our own hearts, which would leave no room for pride, superiority or hatefulness, even toward those who tear their throats open screaming out opinions opposite our own.

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” Rumi

But I hadn’t thought about all of this when I decided to try not sharing my opinion with people unless they specifically asked for it. I knew it was impossible to make myself stop having opinions about things, but I could control sharing them. I reasoned after some time of keeping my mouth shut, I’d naturally lose the compulsion to form opinions about everything. The opiate is in the sharing, not in the having.

I’d already had some practice anyway from when I’d stopped trying to convince my husband of how wonderful I thought I was. When I let go of caring what his opinion was of me, it was easy to apply that to the wider world of humans. (Although I will admit I still care about my cat’s opinion of me, but she is a more trustworthy judge of character than any homo sapien I know.)

I’ve got quite an eclectic array of opinionated friends. I’m still quite close with my best friends from kindergarten. I’ve stayed friends with a good mix of heathens from my bartending party days. And now I’ve got a big group of conservative mom friends. All these people vary widely on the political spectrum, and let’s simplify things and agree that everything is political. So I knew my experiment was going to be interesting. I wasn’t prepared for how transformative it ended up being.

I chose a great time to do it. Donald Trump was president, and we were all just starting to emerge again from our Covid hibernation. George Floyd riots were consuming the world. It was like we’d all been holding our breath and had just been allowed to come up for air. All the opinions swirled together to create the great whirlpool monster that killed off the last of Odysseus’ crew, threatening to suck down all who insisted on throwing their opinion into the mix.

I noticed right away that it was extremely rare for someone to directly ask for my opinion. I enjoy speaking with people and consider myself relatively skilled at holding a conversation. I was a reporter for a few newspapers after college, so I knew how to put people at ease enough to feel comfortable talking with me. And one of the first rules you learn in journalism is that people positively love talking about themselves. Since I was already used to having conversations that were carried on questions I asked about the person I was chatting with, I hadn’t consciously noticed how little people ask for my opinion.

So when you engage in a discussion with another person and you don’t throw your own judgement into the mix, they go on assuming you agree with them. Try it yourself. It’s easier than you might imagine. When someone makes a statement, respond with “Wow, really?” And on they will go.

During this process, it became clear to me that my opinions really didn’t matter. And on the flipside, it didn’t matter if the other person’s opinion was different from my own. I started to ask myself how my life was affected if someone was aware of my opinion, and, more importantly, if it mattered that someone shared my opinion? The answer is no.

Once you subtract opinions out of the equation, it becomes more difficult to feel superior. And what takes the place of superiority is love. It’s much easier to empathize with others when their opinions aren’t obscuring your view of who they really are. Because let’s face it, people are not their opinions.

My personal motto has since become:

“I don’t care what you believe. I only care how you behave.”

When I use my opinion as the standard from which to judge all other opinions, I am making an unconscious statement to myself that I am the ultimate knower of truth, and all those who think differently than I are not just wrong, but bad even. I have a friend who believes the world is flat. I have a group who believes that men can be women. Some that think Donald Trump was sent by God, and others who spent hours going through their Facebook friends to delete and block anyone who followed Donald Trump. Almost all of them believe you can love animals and eat them. But when I don’t care about any of those things, I can see that they are all good people, and we are all just doing our best trying to navigate the insanity of this existence. None of us knows what the hell is going on.

“He who thinks he knows doesn’t know. He who knows that he doesn’t know, knows.” Joseph Campbell

There’s no difference between thinking everyone needs to have the same religious beliefs as you and making an effort to sway or bully or shame others into having the same political convictions as you. Disliking others because they are a different religion is no different than disliking someone for having a different political opinion than you.

So how’d I do? Did my experiment succeed in making me humbler? And am I proud of my accomplishment? An interesting side effect of setting out to tame pride and embrace greater humility is you become aware of the more subtle guises of conceit lurking in your character. I’ve peeled away a surface layer only to find a more stubborn monster underneath.

I’m grateful I’ve been able to get to the point where I can listen to another person say something I completely disagree with and not allow it to affect me. Not only not affect me, but not affect my judgement of them as a person. If I see a guy stop traffic to rescue a pigeon in the road, I know he is a good person. His opinion on the immigration crisis means nothing to me. In the sense that it’s expanded my capacity for empathy, I would consider this experiment a success.

But what about all the people who assume I agree with them when I don’t argue? Am I being dishonest? People do seem at greater ease talking with me about their feelings, but I attribute that more to my greater focus on listening and understanding the person rather on the assumptions they make about my opinion. Besides, any assumption someone makes of me is none of my business.

Happiness was not my goal when I set out on this little experiment. But it has been a welcome byproduct of the effort. So much so that rather than an experiment, limiting my opinions has become a habit. Our species has clogged our hearts with our obsession with opinions. Removing that gunk creates one less obstacle to truly loving my neighbor as myself, another Christian directive that extends into the spiritual wisdom of prehistory.

What’s your opinion?

**Side note: I get a number of calls from people needing advice after rescuing sick or injured wildlife or dogs and cats. In those situations, I obviously offered my opinions freely. I think most of us can discriminate between necessary opinions about things we can control and gratuitous opinions.