Beliefs, values, goals, and actions are four legs to a table. You can’t have one without the other.
Beliefs are the learned summaries or conclusions that every person has automatically absorbed throughout their entire life. The beliefs that you have are influenced by the culture you are born into, your socioeconomic environment, the educational opportunities that were made available to you or that you pursued, etc. 99.9% of your brains computing is happening automatically, non-consciously. This 99.9% is constantly evaluating, updating, and adopting new beliefs. That’s part of the reason why propaganda is effective; it happens without effort. The challenge with beliefs is that, while we are all generally certain of the “rightness” of our beliefs, the validity of those beliefs may be completely questionable. Yet, if we don’t have certainty in our beliefs, then the world becomes a very difficult place to be. Without the conclusions that your beliefs provide – the shortcuts to values, actions, and goals – then the world becomes overwhelming.
Values are our assessments of what is valuable to us, what is important to us. It’s our salience network that is constantly evaluating the things in our lives against our beliefs, actions, and goals, and asking the question, should I like this or dislike this? Should I approach this or not? Does this matter to me? It’s guided by principles that we traditionally think of as values, i.e., love, family, etc. Like beliefs, this is always happening. Like beliefs, we can work to change our values and beliefs through neuroplasticity (CBT, meditation, etc. being common modes) , but it is no easy task.
Goals are the destinations we are moving towards. In Buddhism or Stoicism, a part of what they advocate is detachment and acceptance. Don’t strive towards anything, and you can have peace. You will be like a still pond without ripples. To me, it seems our nature is to strive towards surviving and thriving. The direction we are going – that is our goal. Sometimes, we have articulated our goal, and we are explicitly conscious of it. Sometimes, there are many implicit goals, and we have a hard time putting those goals into words. Frequently, our implicit goals conflict with our explicit goals. For example, you’re trying to lose weight, but food is a defense mechanism for a different part of your mind. Learning to bring these parts of your mind into alignment is the definition of integrity – integrating the mind to not be in conflict.
Goals determine if something is useful or not. When no one in the world has goals, we are all completely equal in our value. But once you say, I believe and value achieving this goal, then now you have a measuring stick to say, “These other beliefs, values, actions, and goals are useful or not useful towards achieving the end goal.” That doesn’t touch on the value of the person independent of the goal. It becomes very important than to explicitly know what your goals are, and it becomes very important that you choose wise goals. If you value the wrong things, then it becomes easy to justify malevolence.
The actions you take are reflections of the parts of your brain/psyche that link the different beliefs, values, and goals that you have in different ways. Sometimes, your are actions are taken in a defensive way to protect yourself from physical or psychological hurt. Sometimes, your actions are positive, moving you towards growth and progress.
Religion has provided a template for the beliefs, values, actions, and goals that should be approached and which to avoid. While you can argue the pros and cons of organized religions, one of the effects of religion is that is creates social cohesion by creating shared beliefs. Without it, when people have conflicting beliefs and goals, then there is no agreed-upon way to resolve those differences. Instead, it results in name-calling and disparaging. The problem with this is, as the groups split further and further away, one of the groups may identify their beliefs as so central to their being that opposing beliefs are viewed as attacks on their life. If it gets that far, then eventually, the only way to resolve disputes that are that big is with violence. I hope that we find a way to stop fracturing the country into smaller, ideological-centric tribes.
A few of us spend time each week trying to work on this problem. We welcome people to join us. We are also building our tribe. People who have shared beliefs and values who want to strive towards the same goals and actions of surviving and thriving together. The best way to change the world is by changing ourselves.