In his book, Falling into Grace: insights on the end of suffering, Adyashanti tells a story from his childhood about how he finally understood why adults seemed so unhappy at times. He realized they suffer because they confuse reality with their thoughts about reality. He wrote, “That’s why they suffer! That’s why they get into conflict. That’s why they behave strangely, in ways that I don’t understand, because they actually believe the thoughts in their head.”
He went on to explain: “When we believe our thoughts, in that instant, we begin to live in the world of dreams, where the mind conceptualizes an entire world that doesn’t actually exist anywhere but in the mind itself. When we believe in our thoughts, when we believe at the deepest level that they in fact are equal to reality, we can start to see how this leads directly to frustration, discontent, and ultimately to suffering on many levels.”
As a therapist in the 1970s, who became a psychologist in the early 80s, this connection between thoughts and suffering formed the basis for how I learned to conduct my craft of compassion and care. It is hard to imagine any mental health clinician in the last 40 years who hasn’t relied on some form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to assist their clients’ efforts to evade the tricks and traps of their tortured minds.
Newer, mindfulness-based cognitive therapies such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) developed in the last 20 years have now given us even better tools to help clients “mind their minds,” to separate themselves from their cognitions and realize that their thoughts are merely symbols of truth or reality but in themselves are not necessarily true, are definitely not real and are, in fact, the principal reason we suffer.
One of the founders of ACT, Steve Hayes writes, “Suffering occurs when people so strongly believe the literal contents of their mind that they become fused with their cognitions. In this fused state, the person cannot distinguish awareness from cognitive narratives since each thought and its referents are so tightly bound together.”
We suffer because we believe our own minds and fail to recognize how inadequate they are at helping us determine what is true and real. The thought-driven, language-based mind is incredibly unreliable and untrustworthy. In fact, it is not designed to find truth but to win arguments and express and solidify group identity. That is its primary purpose built into it through evolutionary processes based on security, control and above all, survival.
The human brain operates like a biased sports fan or a competitive lawyer determined to win at all costs, not a curious, open-minded scientist seeking pure truth. As David Roberts explains, “Human beings are not primarily rational creatures. We are primarily social creatures. Most of what we believe, we do not conclude. We do not reason to it at all. We inherit it.”
“Conclusions,” Roberts states, “are usually the beginning, not the end, of human reasoning.” We use our minds to justify our beliefs, not make sure they are accurate and truthful.
In other words, all of us unconsciously use motivated reasoning to interpret, process, and even distort information to ensure that it conforms to what we believe about the world. This process includes rationalization, which Adrian Bardon defines in his book, The Truth About Denial: Bias and Self-Deception in Science, Politics, and Religion, as “the generation of spurious reasons to maintain those sincerely held beliefs.”
Roberts writes, “We are primed to resist information that casts doubt on our core beliefs and values. Such resistance is deeply rooted, often operating at a level beneath conscious awareness.” Our brains are designed to believe what we are told by trustworthy sources within our group, especially if it strengthens our group identity and separates us from others we have been trained to fear, demonize, distrust and often hate.
This isn’t surprising, of course. Our brains, whether we are conservative or liberal, have always functioned this way. What is different is the extremely polarized nature of our politics in recent decades and the mendacity of Donald Trump, the Republican Party and conservative media to manipulate the minds of their followers to believe lies about the climate crisis, the pandemic and the presidential election.
While science is recognized as the one and only means by which we can systematically and reliably study and explain physical reality, conservative ideology espoused by Republican politicians and right-wing media have been actively disparaging and undermining their followers’ faith in the factual findings of science for decades.
While all scientific evidence clearly shows, and 83 percent of Democrats agree that Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election was “definitely legitimate,” only 6 percent of Republicans concur.
According to a recent study, one reason for conservatives’ confusion about reality is that they “are less able to distinguish political truths from falsehoods than liberals, mainly because of a glut of right-leaning misinformation.”
While the study found that liberals and conservatives were equally susceptible to “believe claims that promoted their political views,” those on the right found “the deck… stacked against” them “because there is so much more misinformation that supports conservative positions. As a result, conservatives are more often led astray.”
This isn’t new, of course. A dozen years ago, Rush Limbaugh informed his listeners that he and other conservatives were the only trustworthy sources of truth available to the public (“where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it”), since the universe containing government, academia, science and media “is an entire lie.” He said, “Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit. That’s how they promulgate themselves; it is how they prosper.”
Ten years ago, Mann and Ornstein wrote, “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”
How can we hope to function as a collaborative, healthy democracy when we no longer agree on what is true or real, when legitimate threats like the collapse of the Earth’s ecosystems this decade are ignored and the truth of a global pandemic is deliberately obscured and trust in the legitimacy of our institutions of power are intentionally undermined?
The brains of conservative Americans lack the capacity to determine what is true when continually exposed to disinformation from sources they trust and respect in the Republican Party and conservative media. All of this has to change or American democracy as we have known it for 250 years will end.
