The Corrosive Power of Wrong Belief

The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves.

—Elvin Semrad

In The Last Jedi, Luke Skywalker—embittered and cynical in response to his failures as a teacher—is reluctantly instructing a new student about the Force. He asks her what the Force is, and when Rey responds, Luke derisively replies: Amazing—everything you just said was wrong. 

It may be my favorite line in the whole film.

It is indeed amazing how often and for how long we can be misled by wrong, unhelpful, or life-draining beliefs. Here are just a few with which you might be familiar:

“I deserve…”—Of course, there are things we can rightly say that everyone deserves, such as basic human respect, or doesn’t deserve, like randomly dying in a terrorist attack. But on the other extreme, it seems like half the advertising campaigns running at any given time include some version of “you deserve.” The big problem with this is that is pulls us away from thankfulness, and without thankfulness, happiness is virtually impossible. The idea that I deserve something makes happiness dependent on something external that I don’t have rather than on an internal mindset about what I do have. Dwelling on what we deserve doesn’t serve us well.

Performance is more valuable than character. This is the wrong belief that a person’s functionality is the most important factor in determining his or her value. Taken to an extreme, this belief dehumanizes those who are evaluated by it, turning them into “human doings” instead of human beings. The better belief: value is a function not only of what we do and how well we do it, but also of who we are. When we consider the power of culture and the skill that can be developed through teaching and diligence, we see that character, integrity, and virtue are actually at least as valuable as raw performance.

Connection depends on being informed. The fear of missing out (“FOMO”) is related to this wrong belief. Think of the teenager who can’t tear herself away from Snapchat. She stays tuned in because she’s afraid of missing out on the updates of the 529 other youth in her social network and consequently (she says) being socially excluded in the real world. It’s a common trap of the information age. But real connection is not a function of consuming information. It’s a two-way street.

It may not be possible totally to avoid buying into wrong beliefs from time to time, but there are actions we can take to protect us from the corrosive power they can have over time. Conversations with a good coach are often the means through which we see the wrong beliefs we couldn’t see before and thus liberate ourselves from their destructive power. There are some things we can’t do alone on an island.