The Origin of Our Beliefs
The awareness of this will free yourself.
Have you ever stopped to think and question yourself why do you believe in the thing you do? If you were born in another place, Would you believe in the same things? and if you were born in another time? in another family?
It seems that our internal beliefs are something circumstantial or at least were greatly influenced by them. That’s not something new, but is a big one and it’s important to keep it in mind.
The facts
I don’t want to repeat myself with some data from other posts. I’ve written other articles about our evolution. So, we’ve been evolving for a long long time (about 6 million years) and one of the most important things that drove us forward evolution is our big brains.
But that wasn’t for free. We had a limited budget for upgrades. So in order to keep our big brains, evolution had to sit down and do some math on an excel spreadsheet contrasting costs against benefits.
The benefits were obvious:
- A chimp never could win an argument with us. (But it could knock us down like a mosquito).
- We’ve invented the internet. In your face chimp! Anything else?
The costs were big:
- It requires a lot more energy: homo sapiens brains account 2%-3% of the total body weight and consumes the 25% of our total body energy at rest compared to the 8% on other apes.
- Is not easy to carry around especially when encased in a massive skull.
Like governments divert funds from defence to education, humans diverted energy from muscles to neurons.
Many things had to change but the more important (relevant to this post) is the following:
The women required narrower hips to stay upright constricting the birth canal. Think about it: big brains babies and a narrow birth canal… A disaster!
That was the reason why humans began to be born prematurely when their other systems were still in development.
Natural selection favoured this and, since then, human babies are born defenceless and depend for many years on the protection and education of adults.
This brought with it a great advantage: the great social skills that we have nowadays. And it is due to the fact that at an early age we are so malleable that the education received at that time is imprinted deep within us. And if you continue printing it generations over generations you’ll get a so powerful common belief.
Some insights
- We are all free to believe what we want. I totally encourage to do that.
- But now that you are aware of its origins, you have great power in your hands.
- In my case, I am very happy to have it. It makes me responsible for any action I take and any belief I choose.
Thank you.
