It occurred to me to look up the word “believe”, see what it means. I’ve found it very helpful to break words apart sometimes, and find the etymology of each piece and hints of how they got put together. So I looked it up in the online 1903 Websters Unabridged dictionary I like using. It seems to me what I found is that it means to “give license” to the authority of another, lacking personal knowledge of the facts, using “-lieve” as you would in “give leave to”. It helps to follow the link to see where the entry on “leave”.

In any case, the serious flaw in believing anything is that belief results in one trusting the concept in your own mind as being a fact of nature, as per the long established usage, just by granting it to be so when lacking a way of knowing it to be fact. If people take as fact, without knowing, and believe that housing prices will rise ever faster to make good on all bets, well then people will think of that as confirmed by everyone around them and a simple obvious truth. That belief that it is “normal” for wealth to continually multiply seems to be at the heart of all financial bubbles in fact, and they all appear in hindsight as the whole community swept up it them going mad. Almost nothing is more appealing to people than having bets that are sure to win and being able to add their winnings to their bets… universally popular, and not even the scientists studying the very predictable results seem able to say what the problem is.

So what alternatives do we have to accepting a popular myths as fact, and granting them your belief? Our minds, being the source of their own meanings for what our senses record, at best inventing credible possibilities in the world, and really shouldn’t be relied on as authoritative to be believed as most people naively seem to. What the meanings that appear to us, like magic as we think or respond to others, seem to betoken is much more like the results of an experiment, with letting some hint or inkling flower in our minds, drawing on the whole ecology of our experience.

There seem to be a great many features of thought that make it like the workings of an ecology, that as accumulative evidence make be trust it more than just to grant that idea the authority of a belief. Thoughts are a lot like plants, developing from their seed in their particular environment, but turning out to both “change the world” and be just “throwaways” like everything else in nature, a flowering that bears fruit and seeds, and enriches its soil in passing. Of course, a logical world simply could not work if all it’s parts simply did whatever they did as self-expression, as throw aways with no consequence but leaving seeds and soil for other things to grow like nature. So, I like the idea that in the wild of nature, resiliency is rather illogical. It seems to necessarily rely on individuals developing as they will as self-expression, and their value to others being what they simply throw away.