What do We (Really) Believe?

I’ve been thinking lately about what I believe. It’s a touchy subject, frankly. Everyone likes to paint themselves the hero in the hypothetical, but real life is much messier. When the building is burning, it will take more than well-placed motivational posters to keep us on the straight and narrow.

What do we believe?

How can we know? I’m tempted to say we know what we believe by what we do, but that leaves us with such a small slice of real experience. When you survey the stretch of history, our short existence seems quite homogenous and truthfully, quite benign. How much variation has your life known? How would you act during the Black Death? The Inquisition? The Crusades? Jim Crow? Rwandan genocide? A famine or two? A plane crash in the Amazon?

Perhaps we can look back at what we have done. How we have acted. Have we been moral? Have we been good? Have we been altruistic? I’d say that in all but a few cases, it’s very difficult to say.

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, most of us are absolutely corrupted. We may not have a lot of control or power in the larger world, but often we exercise a great deal of power over ourselves and if we were honest, we often use that power to preserve us. We’re looking out for number one in many cases. Often, even when it looks like we’re looking out for others.

I have a friend who resigned from her dream job with a non-profit when it became clear that fraudulent activity was separating some amount of money from the people it was intended to benefit. I think she knows what she believes.

I recently taking an ethics course, and the instructor, a lawyer, talked about choosing in advance how we would handle certain situations. Maybe that’s a start. Choosing how we would handle the possibilities, and then choosing what we focus on and allow into our minds each day. I don’t think we’ll ever know what we’re capable of entirely, but we can know the sort of foundation we’ve built and can be sure of what we’re adding to ourselves each day.

Perhaps that’s as close to certainty as we can get.