Wisdom Trap: Truth Believer

Knowledge in this world can be divided into three types: Truth, Belief, and Assumptions. To determine if a matter belongs to the specified type of the subject, it’s all depending on how we view the subject.

Truth is an undeniable subject. For instance, sky will be blue in colour during day time if it’s a sunny day is one truth that we cannot deny. If we want to deny, means we want to say that the clear blue sky is actually not blue. Of course, we can further deny it by specifying that the sky seems blue in our eyes but it’s actually not the case when we look at at the point of the universe. But simply put, the sky is indeed blue during day time when we look at it.

Belief is a subject that we want to think it’s true according to our knowledge and willingness. It’s a subject that can be denied for many reasons regardless the willingness of the people. You probably notice, the most related subject would be religion. It’s an issue that people can deny them in many ways regardless of how many believers a religion has. While the believers can provide all the proofs, theories and information to prove that their religion is a truth and it’s not just a matter of belief, the subject can still be denied because there is no absolute truth in the subject.

Assumption will not be covered here although it’s somehow related. It’s basically a subject that is created based on weak reasoning or points that not are not proven to be solid. Thus cannot be relied in most cases.

“Truth Believer” is a type of inaccurate mindset to think that the subject that they believe in is a truth. It’s incorrect to think that a belief would be a truth because these two are different matters. It’s the same concept that you can’t say that an Apple is same as Orange although these two are fruits.

Again, religious person frequently demonstrate such practice when they claim that their god is real although there isn't much solid proofs to support that. No matter how many documents, books, or discoveries existed, all supporting matters are not solid in most cases. And it’s quite common that assumptions and other thoughts that are made up according to the supporting matters would occur.

This topic not only related to religious people, my main focus is actually more on usual society thinking. This phenomenon can occur everywhere as long as we have knowledge and we have idea of what is true and false.

Truth believer is one of the wisdom trap because it’s an occurrence when we have knowledge, and we use that to judge the solidity of certain subjects. A partial problem occur when we put out feeling into it when we want to think that certain subjects must be true or false, regardless of how much we know about it.

One of the related fallacies that produced by Truth Believer mindset is general prejudice. When we walk on the street and we notice a particular person face, we would have a great idea of what type of personality and attitude he/she has based on his/her appearance and behaviour, without having any idea who is him/her, what type of background he/she has, or wanted to know the true personality he/she has. Sometimes we only have a brief and simple thoughts about it and we forget about it, but sometimes we have a strong thoughts that the person must be the type of person we thought he/she is. Probably because a certain behaviour remind you of someone you know, and you immediately relate this stranger to be the same person that you knew.

This is not an issue until we truly develop a type of strong feeling in that person because he/she remind us of someone we knew in the past without us realizing such feeling. For example, he/she talks really loud when using the phone and is really rude. You would thought he/she must be an inconsiderate person and does not has any manner at all. So you would avoid him/her and not letting him/her to get close to you because he/she might crash on you instead of avoiding you as he/she walks.

In this case, you are actually believing that the person is inconsiderate and rude due to his/her behaviour, but your consciousness telling you to avoid that person because your mind telling you that getting near to him/her will definitely be a bad idea. I don’t deny the possibility that things would happen according to what you think because you have a good reason for thinking it that way, but this does not conclude that it definitely going to happen. Not only that this is a matter of possibility, it’s also relate to you believing that your thoughts definitely came true, because you unconsciously thought that what you believe is a truth. When the Truth Believer instincts occur, you develop prejudice to a person or subject, and refuse to find out what is the truth behind your idea or how true is your thoughts.

In a much serious case, when you are being cheated by a certain of person before, you will developed a strong beliefs, in which you thought of it as a truth, that anyone that you met that belong to that type must be a cheater as well.

You probably heard this before: “There is no good guy in this world” or something similar. I heard a lot of it when the lady who said this is really firm with it and there is no space for debates on this subject. While there are possibilities that they were just parroting what other people said, it’s also not surprising that they encounter terrible experience before and thus creating such claims.

While I don’t feel offended of any hard feeling of this subject, but I have to emphasize that this is definitely not a truth because who they met in the past remain in the past, it has nothing to do with any other guy in this world. Just because you have not seen any good guy, you can’t just conclude that there is no good guy anymore. Furthermore, claiming things that way only creating a strong resistance for them to consider things the other way. When a good guy finally appear before them, their Truth Believer instincts would pull them away from the good guy. So it will be really hard to realize things when they are unwilling to think things a little different. On side note, if a girl always surrounded by bad guys, they should really consider if there is any problem with their lifestyle.

This is why, Truth Believer will be an obstacles for us to be willing to understand things better and we are directly influence by our own feeling to improve our thinking and knowledge. We even get to become really unwilling to find out what supposed to be right and wrong. It’s also really common that such mindset not only lasted for a period of time until they willing to reconsider the subject, there are also unlimited cases where people carry the same mindset for the rest of their life. Unwilling to know what supposed to be right and wrong even at the end of their life.

When a person had fallen as Truth Believer in one or more subjects, they would practice in that way in their usual days. They might even teach others about their beliefs but claiming that to be truth to ask people to practice their life according to the way they want.

Remember how frequent and serious our parent is when they taught us not to talk to strangers? I strongly support the fact that we must not simply talk to strangers to avoid the risk of any unwanted thing happen to us. But I also need to urge on the importance of socializing to expand your network and meeting with more people for sharing of knowledge and idea to make your life more meaningful. It may sounds a crash between not talking to strangers and meeting new people to make your life more meaningful, what I’m trying to emphasize is your mindset when meeting with new people, you can have your thoughts to be cautious and beware when certain people would have a bad idea on you, but there are people who are sincere about meeting new friends and they might be capable of changing your life for good. Imagine if you fallen as a Truth Believer in this subject, you probably not going to meet any kind people and you will always be in your comfort zone without anything new and interesting for the rest of your life.

So basically, to avoid falling as Truth Believer, it’s simply a matter of identifying what should be truth and what should be belief. While it sounds simple, it’s actually really difficult as there are infinite amount of people out there who only focus on living as a Truth Believer for the rest of their life. You might want to consider them having weaker wisdom and knowledge, but bear in mind that such situation occurs to all type of people regardless of how great or capable they are, or how great is their education qualitifaction. So failing into such wisdom trap is really easy and it’s not simple to pull yourself out from it. Especially we humans have a strong ties to our own feeling, which often screw things up.