Belief as a Constraint

One of the biggest categories of constraints on our behavior, on our ability to solve problems, answer questions, and generally find our way through the labyrinth of reality, is belief. I do not just mean religious (or at least supernatural) beliefs, though those are close to the core of most people's belief systems, or political and economic beliefs (though those tend to be almost as central as religious beliefs), but our fundamental beliefs of how the world works. Belief is a constraint because it filters reality for us. Let me put it this way. Whatever is out in the "real world" is accessible to us only through our senses, which represents the first level of filters, is processed by our minds (for the sake of argument, let's call the mind brain plus existing content, though that is clearly a simplification), and then brought to consciousness. Our bodies may be reacting to unconscious content, we can certainly act on such implicit understanding, as we do with most skilled or repetitive tasks, but for understanding the world, and acting with intention, we need to bring the things in our environment into consciousness. Belief acts as a filter as soon as we bring something to consciousness, because our conscious mind craves consistency and seeks to fit any new information into an existing pattern.

To start with, here is a non-religious, historical example. The notion of racial superiority was deeply ingrained into most white Europeans and Americans in the first half of the last century with a certainty that few whites could muster today. The certainty came in large part from a century of rapid and successful colonial expansion, reinforced by both Darwinism and a variety of Christian interpretations of the Bible on race. White Europeans and Americans were a much more dominant force in the world than they are today, and their form of Christianity, their systems of politics and economics, were spreading with breathtaking speed. Prior to the Second World War, there were few things to challenge this sense of superiority. 

So it was that in 1941, the United States, the British Empire and Commonwealth, and the Dutch Government in Exile (including the Dutch East Indies) got a rude awakening. The beliefs about the cultural and physical inferiority of the Japanese were so deeply ingrained that it was thought that their soldiers were far inferior to their larger, western counterparts, their eyesight was deemed so bad that their fighter pilots were assumed to be nearly unable to hit a target (something the on-going air war in China should have negated), and it was presumed that all of their best equipment was of foreign design but inferior construction. So deep were these prejudices that the US military actually assumed that the accurately reported speed and range of the soon-to-be-dreaded Zero fighter was a propaganda ploy, even though they were reported accurately. No other country possessed a fighter with those characteristics, so it was impossible that the "backward" Japanese could have created such a machine. Likewise, the early operations of the Japanese Army and Navy completely overwhelmed the defenses of the British, Americans, and Dutch because the operations were so audacious, so daring, so innovative, and so heavily predicted on the toughness of Japanese soldiers and battle-honed skills of their pilots that they seemed beyond belief. From Pearl Harbor to the Gin-Drinker's Line of fortifications guarding Singapore, the allies paid the price for their hubris, for their racist beliefs. In the long run, most in the West eventually learned the lesson, or at lest had this part of their belief system so shaken by these, and by repeated blows from later events in Malaya, Korea, and Vietnam, that the old certainty could never be recovered by most. 

The Japanese, of course, also suffered from a similar set of beliefs, built up by from their mythology, from the political manipulation of their native religious traditions of Shinto, and through highly effective indoctrination through the school system and mass media. They saw the West as too soft and indecisive, certainly as too pleasure loving. A few, such as Yamamoto, may have understood what the industrial strength of the Anglo-Saxon countries meant, or the moral effect that a surprise attack would have, but even they were willing to take the risk, for their belief system also held that it was better to go down fighting than ever surrender. The leaders understood that they had either to compromise with Roosevelt over the war in China or risk all-out war by seizing the oil-rich French Indochina and Dutch East India. Within their belief system, only the second possibility was possible. This was made so, as Ari Hatta has shown in her excellent Japan 1941 because the highest levels of political decision making emphasized unity and discredited opposition. Because they shared the same basic beliefs and values, and had grown up in a political system that severely limited frank discussion and debate, war with the West became almost inevitable, even if the form of the initial attacks was not. 

Both sides had such a strong and settled belief in their own superiority that they could not understand things as they were or as they unfolded. The Western beliefs began to crack before the Japanese (suffering from what they some called "the victory disease," a kind of collective ego inflation brought on by the lightening victories of the first six months), though it took repeated post-War blows to finish them off as mainstream ideas. The Japanese beliefs may have begun to deteriorate, but their political culture and their industrial weakness made it more difficult for them to recover than than it was for the United States and the British Commonwealth. 

One of the things about beliefs is that they tend to be self-reinforcing, so that anything that seems to confirm them, no matter the real cause, strengthens a given belief, while those things that contradict them are explained away or ignored, sometimes even when the evidence is overwhelming. I suggested above that the European and a American experience of colonialism had served to reinforce white racism.  The coincidence of European technical advances and the senescence of the Chinese Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and several other Asian states gave Europeans a false sense of superiority.  Indeed, superiority of Victorian technology, and the comparative stability of Europe's governments in that era, were simply seen as manifestations  of racial and religious superiority.

The blindness of belief to other causes and forces in the world is itself an important constraint on belief that both allows it to grow unchecked while blinding believers to alternatives. In some cases, the constraints on our thought and behavior are nested. Both the nesting and the mutual reinforcement of constraints for future posts.