Addiction to Belief

Recently a student asked me whether I thought it was possible for someone to be addicted to a belief.

This is an interesting question and provokes some real thinking. Here is a beginning – or several.

First, some preliminaries. What is a belief? Lots of things are happening in the brain, or the mind, or in consciousness. There is a whole bunch of stuff bouncing around in our heads -- associations, darting thoughts, memories, impulses just coming into awareness, lots of impulses probably that do not rise into awareness – some perhaps that never do.

What is different about a belief, from all this other stuff, is that in addition to merely being another thought that we entertain in the course of thinking (a wish, a recollection, a flash of anger, a daydream image, whatever) is that – in the case of belief – we add the element of conviction, commitment, affirmation, or some kind of assertion of the thought. Not just: the thought X (whatever it is) but the thought X + the assertion of X (the assertion of this thought). The content of thought, which can be expressed as a proposition (a statement that is either true or false), is asserted as true.

What I mean by this is that belief involves some amount of saying to yourself, and saying to other people if they ask you about it, that you assert a proposition, or hold it true, or mean to defend it – you are putting yourself on the line and saying – yeah, this is right, this is true, I am standing up for this statement. If I believe that 2 + 2 = 4, I am not just thinking this thought, but I am asserting the truth of it. So in effect when I believe something then I have isolated an item in the world of thought (the content of the belief) and I am committing myself to defend this item.

Looking closer, believing a belief seems to involve a bit of confidence, trust, reliability, or some faith that this statement is true. It's as if I was saying to myself: I don't need to worry about this any more. I am convinced, I am on board, I am cool with this and I don't have to stress about it. Thus a belief is a kind of relaxation of tension, it's a calming, tranquilizing, anti-stress, zone-out state of mind. This is why it makes sense to talk about belief in terms of addiction. An addict needs a fix to cool out and not stress about getting his or her next high. When the addict gets high on whatever it is he or she is addicted to, there is a relaxation of tension – now I'm cool.

People talk about physical addiction and psychological addiction. It is possible to be psychologically addicted to a thing or a substance or a person or a routine. When you don't get that thing, you stress out and your body goes through all kinds of shut-down routines. A baby has a blankie. The blankie helps the baby calm down. Psychologists call this a transitional object. The baby is showing addictive behavior, drug-seeking behavior, in relation to his blankie – his transitional object.

Now another piece of the puzzle is that there are degrees of belief. I can believe something a tiny little bit; or with an open mind; I can believe something very strongly; and I can believe something so strongly that my very identity depends on it (this is sometimes referred to as an "aggressive identity" – as in the case where I have to see myself as a Christian and if I do not see myself as a Christian then I do not know who I am any more). In the case where the degree of belief is extreme and I cannot get along without it, then I can be said to be addicted to that belief; you could say that I hold that belief to be sacred; that I am unable to question the belief. This shows that I am not holding the belief as a reasonable person who can look at it objectively and doubt it and question it and perhaps reject it or decide to keep believing it. I am holding onto it like a fix.

It does not make sense to say that any belief that we hold strongly counts as a belief that we are addicted to, because even among beliefs that I hold very strongly I may be able to look at them objectively and question them and discuss them rationally with an open mind. A sign that the belief has an addictive quality and represents a kind of psychological dependence is that I cannot look at it, question it, hold it in suspense, consider alternatives. An addict who is deep in the hole of addiction is stuck and cannot find a way out. A rational person can believe something without going overboard. The American pragmatist philosopher and psychologist William James used to talk about overbelief and underbelief in this sense. James thought that a person who had no conscience suffered from a kind of underbelief. A person with a fanatical religious conviction suffers from a kind of overbelief.

So: Can a person be addicted to a belief? My view on this is: yes, a person can be addicted to a belief. The things that a person trusts and does not have to worry about, stress about, that are settled, and about which the person is cool, are his or her beliefs. Maybe the person is addicted to some of them and maybe not. I believe that I am a decent person and not an asshole, that kindness is better than cruelty, and that 2 + 2 = 4. I do not think that I am addicted to these beliefs because I am willing to look at them and I know that I could be wrong about at least some of them. Experience has taught me that I am wrong a lot of the time. So I am trying not to be a belief addict. I am trying to be more like a believer who has some composure about belief, some maturity, some moderation, some self-consciousness, some humility. I better not believe too much or too strongly because I don't know that much and I have keep the door open about my being completely wrong.

I am trying to get to the point where I do not need belief; but I know that I always need me – that is: I need to be present in my thinking. I need an open mind, I need thoughtfulness, I need patience and many other virtues, and I know that I pay a very high price when I can’t find these things. Instead, I fall back to believing.