Not Ready For That

image by AI; my own prompt Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how reluctant we humans are to accept truths that clash with our worldview — our beliefs about the world. This is, of course, understandable. Our worldview is a complicated, interwoven set of judgements, feelings, and other results of sense-making that we have amassed over a lifetime. It’s the lens through which we see and evaluate everything. And it’s our bulwark, our fortress that, we think, protects us from dangers, from misinformation, and from causing harm to others. When we are forced to accept that an integral part of that worldview is false, it can be threatening, undermining not only that core belief but the many other beliefs we’ve built up that depend on that shattered belief, that only make sense if that core belief is true. I’ve written about all the things that I’ve changed my mind about, and none of these changes came easily. My acceptance that we have no free will took 50 years, for example, and it…