What do you believe?

(For a couple of years I participated in an experimental blogging site that attempted to pay bloggers for their posts based on reader interaction with the posts. That site is now defunct, but I have copies of many of the entries I posted there. I feel the need to share some of them, so I'm blowing the dust off the archive and copying them here.)

For several years now, I have regularly listed to the “This I Believe” podcast, produced by This I Believe, Inc.  Each podcast is an essay that reflects a core belief of the author, and together, these essays provide an interesting look at the wide range of values and beliefs people hold to be important across our society.  This I believe, Inc. is based on the Edward R. Murrow radio show of the same name from the 1950s, with the goal of encouraging people to begin the difficult task of respecting other’s differing beliefs.

While Murrow’s radio show featured essays that were mostly by famous or significant public figures, the essays collected by the modern incarnation of this project are written by ordinary people from all walks of life, across the entire spectrum of our society.  Listening to them sheds light on people’s hopes and dreams, and shows us that no matter how we express them, our core beliefs are, for the most part, not really all that different.

I have been tempted, from time to time, to submit an essay to This I Believe, Inc.  Unfortunately, I have never been able to settle on a single core belief to write about.  Instead, I find myself wanting to write about several different beliefs.  So, instead of submitting an essay there, I think I just might write a series of articles here instead.

In the meantime, I put the question out there for everyone else: What do you believe?

Reference: This I Believe, Inc. http://www.thisibelieve.org

The world is not black-and-white

 (For a couple of years I participated in an experimental blogging site that attempted to pay bloggers for their posts based on reader interaction with the posts. That site is now defunct, but I have copies of many of the entries I posted there. I feel the need to share some of them, so I'm blowing the dust off the archive and copying them here.)

I believe in complexity.

So many people are out there trying to sell simple answers.  They offer quick fixes to life’s problems, shortcuts to happiness.  Even our leaders promise that they can fix the world with just a few simple policies.  Listening to all of these voices, you might think that the world is black-and-white, and that for every problem there is a single correct solution.

But life isn’t simple.  It isn’t black-and-white.  Life is shaded in a vast range of greys.  Life is complex, difficult, messy.  The world’s problems are joined together, connected in a vast tangled web, so that attempts to address one impact many others, often in negative ways.  Any solutions that have a hope of working need to address a range of issues all at the same time.  And these answers are almost certainly going to be found in the vast grey areas in between the easy, black-and-white answers.

I don’t trust people who promise easy fixes.  Either they are lying, or they aren’t thinking hard enough about the problems they are trying to solve.  I don’t believe they have the answers we need.  I trust those who take the time to listen to every side of a debate and try to understand the merits of every position.  They are the ones who are most likely to see the possibilities hidden in the grey.

But until we acknowledge the incredible complexity of life, we have little hope of making any lasting changes.

(This article is part of a series about the things that I believe, which I proposed here: resqgeek.dreamwidth.org/222496.html)