Errol Morris: What We Believe About Beliefs

What you think you know is probably wrong — and that’s putting it nicely

Everybody has his own creation myth. Here’s mine. God, in his infinite wisdom, gave man self-deception, figuring that if he could effectively deceive himself, he would have an easier time deceiving others.

Years ago I read an anecdote about the 19th-century utopian community of Zoar. It was mentioned in passing in a book about forensic psychiatry. And, try as I might, I haven’t been able to source it since. The story concerns the last living inhabitant of Zoar, a woman who on her deathbed said, “Think of all those religions. They can’t all be right. But they can all be wrong.”

For me, her words emphasized the insidious nature of belief. That we can believe whatever we want to believe. And often do. But in all likelihood, what we believe is wrong. Maybe not just wrong. Even stupid.

So, here’s what I believe. I believe that to believe anything is to throw yourself down a bottomless pit of error. And the nastiest snake oil salesman of all is oneself.

Imagine you’re in a dark alley. Not Plato’s cave — no, no. I have little or no interest in imagining myself in Plato’s cave and, anyway, if Plato is to be believed, we’re all in his cave.

No, I’m imagining something quite different. A dark alley where I’m suddenly accosted by a grubby-looking fellow who puts his face a little too close to mine and says, “What’s the big idea?”

How should I respond? Let me take a stab at it — although I hesitate to use the word “stab” when talking about an encounter with a grubby-looking fellow in a dark alley. Clearly, he’s challenging me. He thinks I’m in possession of some preposterous, ponderous and possibly pretentious idea. Here are a few examples. Perhaps I could say that there’s no such thing as justice, or that truth is inevitably relative, or that foot pain is worse than an earache. Or maybe that all matter is particles, or waves, or, if I’m really trying to be clever, I could say it’s both. I could quote the NBC show “ALF” and turn the question back on him: “Why is it called cargo when it comes by ship, and a shipment when it comes by car?”

I’m so glad I didn’t go to an Ivy League school. The greasy-looking fellow — did I first say grubby? OK, he’s grubby and greasy — would probably stab me to death.

So what am I supposed to say to this guy? I could say, “There are no really big ideas. Or, if there are, I don’t have any.” Such an argument might prove ineffective and possibly inflammatory. He could point out that not answering the question is unacceptable.

Hidden in the question “What’s the big idea?” is, “What’s your big idea?” What’s your preposterous assumption, your ridiculous belief that you wish to lay claim to as being a powerful life-changing notion?

We often encounter big ideas in an unpleasant context: someone explaining (mansplaining, womansplaining, it makes no difference) some mystery of the universe to us. The solution to Fermat’s last theorem, the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, the origin of species … We’ve all been introduced to popularizers of such ideas offering to help us make sense of them. But what’s the point if we’re not really capable of understanding these things for ourselves?

I interviewed the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot in 2010, just before he died. I so much wanted him to tell me the story of his discovery of fractal geometry, which is, arguably, a big idea. But he didn’t want to go there. He said that the big idea for him wasn’t fractals. He talked about his work on financial markets, a precursor to his work on order amid chaos. But for Mandelbrot, the big idea was that he could have big ideas. Maybe the big idea is that there are such things.

I don’t know whether Mandelbrot believed that fractals were a big idea. It’s hard to believe otherwise. Perhaps others had to convince him. But he finally said something very, very powerful to me that I will never forget. It was about moments of insight and understanding. He told me they’re like heavy curtains that are suddenly drawn up to reveal something profound about the universe.

Maybe the big idea is discovering something that no one had imagined before. Maybe the big idea is something that illuminates the cosmos. Language gives us the ability to lie. But it also gives us the ability to seek the truth. Could the really big idea be the juxtaposition of a sentence with the world around it?

I don’t know. I just keep hoping that greasy, grubby-looking fellow in the alley isn’t going to kill me.

(CREDIT: Ammar Awad/Reuters)