Reassessing one’s World View

Last month I posted about a book which mapped the painful process of someone changing a worldview which he had held passionately and, with some serendipity, a post then arrived from my favourite blogger, Dave Pollard which deserves reproduction (at least partially)

My worldview is a model of the world as I (want to believe I) ‘know’ it, and I am 

seemingly compelled to try to make everything ‘fit’ into that model. And I change 

it reluctantly. I don’t think I’m unusual in this. In this as in many other aspects of 

human behaviour, I am conditioned to believe what I believe — 

• by my personal experiences, 

• by what I’ve been taught by people I trust (or, at least, don’t distrust), 

• by stories that I’ve been told

• by the beliefs of others I know directly or have read or listened to. 

All of this conditioning is filtered through my current worldview. And the 
result — what gets through that filter — is what I purportedly ‘know’….
I used to believe, quite strongly, a lot of things that I no longer believe. My 
worldview has changed, often slowly-and-then-all-at-once, as I found my old 
beliefs simply weren’t tenable. Most recently, I’ve come to understand, to my 
chagrin, that my belief in my country’s (Canada’s) political independence from 
the US Empire was naive. 

• I’ve come to acknowledge that that Empire has been systematically and 

intensively destabilizing and immiserating the lives of most of the world’s 

citizens, if they are unfortunate enough to live in countries 

that aren’t subservient to the Empire’s ideology, and have been doing so for my entire life

• I’ve come to realize that my belief that the PMC are, if ideologically bent, nevertheless relatively informed about the world, open-minded, and inclined to seek collaboration and compromise to solve problems, was completely mistaken. 

• I’ve come to appreciate that our newspapers and other media are not at all committed to seeking and telling the objective truth. 

I suspect that, for many people, realizations that totally undermine one’s worldview 
and belief system would be gut-wrenching. But I’m preoccupied with knowing Why?

Why did my own conditioning lead me to so completely misunderstand what has

 been going on? Why - when there have been such astonishing opportunities for global peace, for redistribution of wealth, for solving the centuries-old problems of poverty and disease, for collaboratively tackling the horrific predicaments that are collapsing our civilization - has our conditioning instead led us to opt for preparations for an un-winnable, global, Empire-vs-Rest-of-the-World war? What madness has gripped our long-suffering species?

More people seem to be talking these days about ”worldviews” (I’m not sure if its one word or two) – so I’m going to develop this theme in the next few posts,