Uprooting Beliefs

Common wisdom says that if you want to “shift” people’s ideas, beliefs, or attitudes you do so by challenging them over time. You pick apart and nudge people away from their current perspective and towards whichever one you think they should have, creating change through gradual movement. If you want equity for women, you have to push people from “Women are not as fully human as men” to “People of all genders are equally human”.

But I don’t think that’s actually how it works.

The above is a model based on the idea that beliefs and perspective are like heavy rocks - they’re stuck where they are and while you can’t just pick them up and put them somewhere else, you can push them and gradually move them where you want them to be. You can take someone’s rock from the field of racial hierarchy and, with time and effort, push it to the field of racial justice. The bigger the boulder, the more effort it takes, but as long as you as push and pull and shove and work, you can move the rock of their beliefs to a new context that will change how they see things.

Certainly that’s true for some things. With some effort and time you might be able to convince someone to support a union or re-examine their beliefs about sexuality. But even then, I don’t think that’s because those beliefs are inherently movable - if they change I think it’s because they were never deeply rooted to begin with.

Less like big rocks, I think deeply held beliefs are more like old growth trees. They get planted in us when we’re young and develop and grow over time depending on how well they’re fed, how much space they’re given, and whether or not there are nearby trees of the same species protecting them from anything that could topple them.

I don’t think you change beliefs by moving the trees, I think you change beliefs by uprooting them and then planting new trees. I don’t think there is any path from “I fundamentally do not see women as my equals and I feel it’s acceptable for me to abuse them for my own wants” to “I fully recognize the humanity of women and am committed to growing that understanding and unlearning the bad habits and beliefs I have that previously reinforced my abusive and dehumanizing attitudes.” With rare exception, I think the only way you get from the first to the second is by utterly destroying the first and then planting the seed for the second and doing the work to cultivate and protect it until it takes root.

In this metaphor, the root system of someone’s belief is their identity, their relationships, or their career - it’s something that extends from the belief and creates material stakes in their life beyond the direct impact of the belief itself. The white supremacist has a stake in white supremacy not just in how it benefits them directly, but in all the social group, economic, and personal identity opportunities and investments they experience as a result. And that belief doesn’t stand in isolation. If a single deeply rooted belief is like a grand old tree, then the forest is someone’s ideology - the thing that makes up their way of approaching, understanding, and experiencing life.

If we think of beliefs and ideologies like trees and forests then some beliefs can be thought of as saplings: easily planted but weak and shallow and thus, easily uprooted. Saplings are most often planted when we’re young, though they continue to be planted sporadically throughout our lives, and are constantly being uprooted. Saplings are things like urban myths, “Every human swallows 10 spiders a year” or “If you die in a dream you die in real life.” We hear these things, believe them, but because there’s nothing to reinforce them except shallow repetition, they’re easily abandoned once challenged by more robust knowledge and reality. They never have the chance to grow roots and there aren’t really any roots to grow since these beliefs are not based in anything real.

Then there are beliefs that grow over time but never get very big or strong. They affect how we live our lives but they don’t define us, we could think of them like fruit trees - not big or strong or robust but helping to sustain us all the same. We might start growing them as children and carry them into adulthood, but with a little work you can be convinced to let them wither. These are beliefs like “Humans need 8 hours of sleep a night” or even “40 hour work weeks are normal and necessary.” You might never let go of these beliefs, but when you start hearing things like, “Actually, humans used to sleep for roughly 4 hours then wake up for an hour then go back to bed for another 4 hours and some people slept for longer and everyone has different internal clocks and circadian rhythms and the 40 work week was won by unions battling longer work weeks but it’s not optimal and actually people are happier and more productive working 20-30 hours a week” you might decide to let your old beliefs go. There are things that reinforce those old ideas - people and institutions with a vested interest in maintaining them - but you aren’t forming meaningful relationships or basing your identity around believing that humans need 8 hours of sleep per night so when properly stressed, that tree can break or be left to rot.

Finally, there are the big trees, the old trees, the trees that we wrap our identities up in and base our worldviews around, that drive our politics and that shape our relationships. These are are the ones that are most heavily fought over, and influenced, by cultural forces and political bodies and outside interests. A hatred of women, a belief in racial hiearchy, an obsession with gender binaries - these are all big, strong, old trees. They’re planted when we’re young and they’re fed and cultivated nonstop from then on. They’re given space and nourishment and as time goes on, more trees of the same species are planted alongside them on the same plot of land until their roots systems intertwine and they all form one big forest where each element - misogyny, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, ableism, etc - combines to form one cohesive, pulsating, living organism that continues to feed and grow and deepen. 

You cannot simply take an old, sturdy forest and replant it somewhere else. You cannot take a collection of beliefs - formed over years and reinforced culturally, socially, and politically - and simply make them into something new. You cannot take the relationships formed through such beliefs and predicated on their continued existence and contort them to fit a completely opposing set of beliefs.

But you can chop down those trees. And you can burn the woods. And you can starve the root systems and block the sun and scare away the wildlife. You can make the woods wither and die while simultaneously planting a new woods elsewhere. And you can tend that new woods gently and lovingly, giving it all the nourishment it needs while bringing back over the wildlife from the old woods. You can plant these new trees near beautiful old growth forests so that it’s easy to see just how incredible it will be when this fresh woods, with all its new flora and fauna, fully matures. 

It’s not enough to plant an equal, or even a better, forest elsewhere - as long as a person’s existing ideology and approach to life continues to serve their wants and needs, or even just as long as it continues to allow them to survive, they have more reasons to stay put than to risk leaving even if leaving offers the promise of something greater.

Nor can you change their existing ideology to become something it’s not. You can’t change if you can’t let go. Trees with deep roots cannot be made into something they’re not, they can only grow or die. To truly see the world differently means abandoning the stability of the forest that’s given you shelter and comfort and taking the chance that there are better more bountiful places to grow if you leave it all behind. But people won’t abandon the relative safety and stability, and sense of truth, that their existing beliefs provide them just because you make a strong case for why your beliefs offer you the same. If you want people to change, you need to offer them somewhere to go and you need to take away the option of staying put.

I do not believe you can nudge or push or tweak people into a commitment to human liberation and global justice. You can’t gradually change someone’s commitment to personal dominance and selfish pursuit into a commitment to community well-being and selfless love. You can’t do it politically, you can’t do it culturally, and you can’t do it personally - there is no way to chip away at something until it becomes its opposite.

However you approach it, whatever your goals, changing deeply held beliefs and ideologies requires recognizing that our sense of self, our connection to community, and our system of wants and values often depends on our beliefs and ideology remaining as they are. You can’t change if you can’t let go and in this case, letting go means potentially losing everything that has defined your life. Very few of us would ever choose that path on our own, regardless of what was being offered. To make real changes in our beliefs we don’t just need to be pulled toward something better, we need to be pushed away from what we know as safe.