Importance of Shared Beliefs

I typed this up from the audio version of the book titled 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson:

Order is where the people around you act according to well-understood social norms and remain predictable and cooperative. It’s the world of social structure, explored territory and familiarity.

I couldn’t understand how belief systems could be so important to people that they were willing to risk the destruction of the world to protect them.  I came to realize that shared belief systems made people intelligible to one another and that the systems weren’t just about belief. 

People who live by the same code are rendered mutually-predictable to one another. They act in keeping with each another’s expectations and desires. They can cooperate. They can even compete peacefully because everyone knows what to expect from everyone else. A shared belief system (partly psychological, partly acted out) simplifies everyone—in their own eyes and in the eyes of others.

Shared beliefs simplify the world as well, because people who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world. There’s perhaps nothing more important than the maintenance of this organization, this simplification. If it’s threatened, the great ship of state, rocks.

It isn’t precisely that people will fight for what they believe. They will fight instead to maintain the match between what they believe, what they expect and what they desire. They will fight to maintain the match between what they expect and how everyone is acting.  It is precisely the maintenance of that match that enables everyone to live together peacefully, predictably and productively.  It reduces uncertainty and the chaotic mix of intolerable emotions that uncertainty inevitably produces.

Imagine someone betrayed by a trusted lover. The sacred social contract obtaining between the two has been violated. Actions speak louder than words. And an act of betrayal disrupts the fragile and carefully negotiated peace of an intimate relationship. In the aftermath of disloyalty, people are seized by terrible emotions: disgust, contempt for self and traitor, guilt, anxiety, rage and dread.  Conflict is inevitable…

Shared belief systems, shared systems of agreed-upon conduct and expectation, regulate and control all those powerful forces.

It’s no wonder that people will fight to protect something that saves them from being possessed by emotions of chaos and terror. And after that, from degeneration into strife and combat.

There’s more to it too. A shared cultural system stabilizes human interaction. But is also a system of value, a hierarchy of value, where some things are given priority and importance, and others are not.

In the absence of such a system of value, people simply cannot act. In fact, they can’t even perceive because both action and perception require a goal. And a valid goal is, by necessity, something valued.

We experience much of our positive emotion in relation to goals. We are not happy, technically speaking, unless we see ourselves progressing. And the very idea of progression implies value. Worse yet is that fact that the meaning of life without positive value is not simply neutral. 

Because we are vulnerable and mortal, pain and anxiety are an integral of human existence. We must have something to set against the suffering that is intrinsic to being. We must have the meaning inherent in a profound system of value, or the horror of existence rapidly becomes paramount; then nihilism beckons—with its hopelessness and despair.

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson