Chapter 5

Existential Viewpoint Beliefs: A Closer Look

Why do Existential Viewpoint Beliefs Matter?

Existential Viewpoint beliefs matter because they determine how agents manage reality, respond to unexpected events, and cope with stress. These beliefs and their associated commitments and predilections support or constrain the ability of leaders, advisors, organizations, and members of movements to deal with the issues they face. They also support or impede openness, objectivity, and sensitivity to error.

Existential Viewpoint beliefs determine the accuracy and completeness of an agent’s grasp of reality. They constrain the thoughtfulness and compassion with which agents evaluate goodness. They affect the balance between creativity and sobriety in agents’ fantasies of improvement and perfection. And they determine the diligence and humility agents bring to bear when formulating and reflecting on the obligations those fantasies allegedly impose on them.

This suite of influences can profoundly affect the odds that the policies and procedures agents fashion, support, and implement will have the effects they anticipate. It also can profoundly affect how agents respond to failures and other unanticipated outcomes.

Existential Viewpoint beliefs, commitments, and predilections impact the ease with which agents exaggerate their knowledge, wisdom, effectiveness, empathy, and benevolence, and that of their advisors, comrades, and followers.

Wholesome informative Existential Viewpoint beliefs, commitments, and predilections help those who embrace them to become more accurate observers. They encourage agents to be thoughtful, caring judges of good and evil. They inspire agents to be creative and humble visionaries and healers of the world who balance passion for what might be with reverence for “what is.” Unwholesome informative Existential Viewpoint beliefs, commitments, and predilections fail to support — and can even undermine — such functioning.

The effects of reassuring Existential Viewpoint beliefs, commitments, and predilections contrast sharply with the effects of their wholesome informative counterparts. Reassuring beliefs, commitments, and predilections help agents distort data, evidence, and reason. By so doing, they bias agents’ grasp of reality, rendering their judgments of good and evil imprudent and uncaring, and their fantasies of improvement and perfection chimerical. More troubling still, such beliefs render agents’ views of the obligations their fantasies impose upon them ill-considered while rendering their views of the freedoms those obligations grant self-indulgent.

Key Characteristics of Informative Existential Viewpoint Beliefs, Commitments, and Predilections

CBA encourages attention to three Existential Viewpoint commitments and predilections that can be uniquely supportive of informative functioning. These include (a) a commitment to “genuineness” or “authenticity,” (b) a devotion to the kinds of relationships that support genuineness/authenticity, and (c) a passion for open, respectful communication.^[1]

Genuineness and Authenticity

Genuineness/authenticity is a commitment to the scientific method informed by the love of creation. According to Canadian philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan, genuineness/authenticity has four components. Those components are listed and defined in Figure 5.1.

Unfortunately, being genuine/authentic can be daunting because agents’ attempts to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible bring them face to face with their flaws and limitations.

• Agents’ attempts to expand their range of experience unavoidably sharpen their awareness of the endless array of experiences they will never have, leading them to reflect on their frailty, their mortality, and their sensory, cognitive, and motoric limitations.
• Agents’ attempts to expand their understanding require them to face the immensity of their ignorance.
• Agents’ attempts to communicate their insights more effectively require awareness of their communicative failures.
• Agents’ attempts to identify the limitations and flaws of their beliefs inevitably bring them face to face with the inadequacies of their conceptions and commitments.
• Agents’ attempts to accomplish their goals may confront them with the shortcomings of their technologies and their limited mastery of those technologies.
• Agents’ attempts to improve their ability to love may compel them to face how poorly they understand the needs of that which they love and the clumsiness of their best efforts to fulfill those needs.

While the struggle for genuineness/authenticity may be inescapably daunting, certain relationships can make this struggle easier to bear. CBA refers to such relationships as “noetic.”^[2]

Noetic Relationships

Noetic relationships are built around activities that make it rewarding to bring out the best in oneself and others. Such activities have inexhaustible goals, such as knowledge, competence, health, beauty, and joy. Anyone may create or experience as much knowledge, competence, health, beauty, or joy as they wish without reducing the amount potentially available to themselves or others.

The goals of truly noetic relationships share a second, closely related characteristic: each person’s attainment of such goals makes others’ attainments easier. Since such goals are inexhaustible and each participant’s success makes others’ successes more likely, there is every reason to root for one another.

But, pace Socrates, to know the good is not necessarily to do the good. Relationships are noetic only if their participants root for themselves and one another to achieve their goals. A relationship is not noetic unless its participants serve as cheerleaders who motivate and inspire others, celebrate their successes, accept the support they receive, and reward those who root for them with gratitude and enthusiasm.

Further, if a relationship is noetic, the rooting and support it inspires cannot focus exclusively on achieving the goal of the moment. Instead, each participant must root not only for success but for the processes that create it. Relationships are noetic only if each participant (a) cherishes, in themselves and others, the desires for experience, knowledge, love, and mastery and (b) delights in the attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility that help satisfy those desires. Finally, the goals around which noetic relationships are built must, if achieved, enhance life or authenticity and diminish neither.

A Counterintuitive Property of Relationships with Noetic Characteristics

As noted above, relationships are noetic if (a) they are built around the pursuit of inexhaustible goals that, if achieved, enhance life or authenticity and diminish neither, (b) participants root for themselves and each other to achieve those goals, and (c) participants root for their own authenticity and that of their partners. Ironically, relationships with two of these three characteristics are not two-thirds as wholesome as those that are fully noetic. While such relationships have much of the passion of relationships that are fully noetic, they lack the benevolence fully noetic relationships inspire.

Relationships built around competition for limited resources encourage participants to view opponents as impediments to achieving their goals. If those goals are seen as vital, such relationships can move participants to dehumanize their opponents or view them as enemies. Moreover, when the goals of such relationships are achieved, competition for the spoils can lead participants to turn against one another. Such pseudo-noetic relationships can be found in criminal gangs, sectarian movements, and partisan politics.

Relationships that are otherwise noetic may also turn out badly if participants disagree over the desirability of demonstrably inexhaustible, life-enhancing goals. Those whose goals meet with disapproval are likely to view their associates as narrow-minded, intolerant, judgmental, self-righteous, condescending, passionless, or hypocritical. The promise of such relationships will likely erode as communication becomes more contentious, joy becomes harder to share, and disappointment intensifies.

What, one may wonder, is wrong with relationships in which participants root for themselves and each other to achieve inexhaustible and otherwise worthy goals without explicitly rooting for genuineness/authenticity? Doing so treats the achievers as means to ends rather than ends in themselves. Thus, such treatment creates alienation, cheapens life, and opens the door to abuse and brutality.

Rules of Discourse Supporting Genuineness/Authenticity

Wholesome informative Existential Viewpoint beliefs must also encourage respectful, open communication. German philosopher and sociologist Jurgen Habermas described the characteristics of such communication in his Discourse Ethics.^[3] Communication violating those rules closes agents to information that may inspire insight and creativity. In addition, such communication deprives agents of feedback that might alert them to bubbles that encase them and rails they are in danger of going off.

Habermas believed open communication required commitments to:

• Making sense by being consistent and avoiding contradicting oneself.
• Meaning what one says.
• Defending one’s positions or justifying one’s refusal to do so.
• Minimizing the influence of force and threats of force on what is said and how it is understood.

CBA argues open communication also requires commitments to:

• Supporting one’s positions with valid arguments and unbiased data.
• Stating one’s positions in ways that render them subject to meaningful discussion or falsification.
• Refusing to buttress one’s positions by manipulating the terms or rules of debate.

Key Characteristics of Reassuring Existential Viewpoint Beliefs

Like informative Existential Viewpoint beliefs, reassuring Existential Viewpoint beliefs can profoundly affect agents’ abilities to formulate and achieve constructive goals. However, much of that effect is negative. Reassuring Existential Viewpoint beliefs encourage agents to distort data, evidence, and logic. They can foster relationships and rules of discourse that help agents deceive themselves, justify whatever they wish to do, and consecrate whatever they desire to be. Reassuring Existential Viewpoint beliefs can:

• Render agents inattentive to potentially troubling experiences and information.
• Discourage disturbing insights.
• Encourage agents to defend comforting beliefs and discredit bothersome beliefs by any means necessary.
• Inspire agents to view their impulsive, irresponsible, short-sighted, and self-serving acts as carefully considered, effective, and virtuous.
• Justify agents’ efforts to fashion relationships and rules of discourse that support assuasive self-deception and self-justification.

In extreme cases, biases associated with reassuring beliefs may be so powerful that any data set will lead to the same conclusion. Take, for example, the data used to support anti-Semitism. As Israeli educator and author Gustavo Perednik observed:

The Jews were accused by the nationalists of being the creators of Communism, by the Communists of ruling Capitalism. If they live in non-Jewish countries, they are accused of double-loyalties; if they live in the Jewish country, of being racists. When they spend their money, they are reproached for being ostentatious; when they don’t spend their money, of being avaricious. They are called rootless cosmopolitans or hardened chauvinists. If they assimilate, they are accused of being fifth-columnists; if they don’t, of shutting themselves away.^[4]

Similarly, as the pioneering American sociologist Robert Merton noted, individuals and groups may create circumstances that validate their prejudices while blinding themselves to their responsibility for doing so. Merton noted that during the early twentieth century, the view of African Americans as strikebreakers contributed to their exclusion from most labor unions and the jobs those unions controlled. Ironically, Merton observed, such exclusion encouraged African Americans to take advantage of strikes (i.e., to be strikebreakers) to obtain positions that were otherwise unavailable to them.^[5]

Reassuring Existential Viewpoint Beliefs Can Be Addictive

Not only do reassuring Existential Viewpoint beliefs have the power to mislead and blind those who adopt them, but they also have the potential to addict those who do so. Agents can become addicted when their beliefs (a) encourage them to use ineffective strategies and (b) fail to insulate them from the consequences of the failures those strategies engender while (c) blinding them to how their beliefs and strategies contribute to their failures. This state of affairs leaves agents subjectively distressed.

Addiction can occur when agents respond to their distress by seeking comfort and guidance from the same reassuring beliefs whose guidance caused their misery. Predictably, the consequences of the guidance such beliefs provide deepen distress, provoking further ineffective comfort-seeking, leading to more profound distress and additional negative consequences.

Princeton University Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis attributes the relative decline of Muslim nations to just such a process.^[6] According to Lewis, Islam teaches that following Allah’s word renders the faithful unquestionably superior and their civilizations inevitably dominant. Thus, Islamic culture paid scant attention to the scientific, technological, philosophical, humanistic, and artistic works of unbelievers, leaving the Muslim world intellectually isolated. In addition, Lewis notes that dominant interpretations of Islam encourage women to devote themselves to being obedient wives and mothers, thus minimizing their activities outside the home. According to Lewis, those practices contributed significantly to the waning of Islamic prosperity and influence, provoking Muslims to ask, “What went wrong?”

Roughly, the answer often has been, “We (Muslims) are not falling behind because we refuse to learn from unbelievers or waste the talents of half our people. We are falling behind because we are insufficiently Islamic. We are too tempted by modernization and too open to Western thought. We fail to enforce Sharia with sufficient passion. We indulge our women’s deviant desires.” Such answers have led much of the Muslim world to become increasingly focused on compliance with the strictures of Sharia and religious observance, increasingly isolated, and increasingly repressive toward women. None of those strategies, steeped in reassuring Existential Viewpoint beliefs, seem likely to restore the dominance of fundamentalist Islam.^[7]

Of course, some reassuring Existential Viewpoint beliefs can help agents manage otherwise debilitating stress. Such beliefs, however, must be used with full awareness of their potential to mislead and addict. As noted previously, reassuring Existential Viewpoint beliefs work their magic by distorting experiences, judgments, and values, thus encouraging ineffective and detrimental actions while blinding agents to the harmful consequences of their guidance.

As such, reassuring Existential Viewpoint beliefs must be chosen with care and employed in ways that maximize the comfort they provide while minimizing their impact on consequential decisions. Ideally, such beliefs should be viewed as fictions that — if used warily — can decrease stress, increase enthusiasm, and enhance motivation without hampering investigation of and action regarding significant realities. Those contemplating the counsel of such beliefs should ask themselves such questions as, “Are my confidence in the truth of this belief and the trustworthiness of its guidance justified?” and, “If this belief was false, how might its guidance be damaging?” To use reassuring Existential Viewpoint beliefs without such care is to invite disaster.

The Importance of Existential Viewpoint Functioning

Why does Existential Viewpoint functioning matter to security analysts? Because the beliefs, commitments, and predilections of the agents, persons, and organizations security analysts scrutinize can profoundly affect:

• The rationality and effectiveness of their actions.
• The nature of their relationships and lines of communication.
• Their openness to corrective feedback.

Highlights of CBA’s Approach to Understanding the Impact of Beliefs

The words in which a belief is expressed provide an incomplete picture of its impact on an agent. A more complete understanding requires knowledge of:

• The guidance the agent assumes (or expects) the belief to provide, including:
  • The fundamental need the agent assumes the belief satisfies.
  • How precise/ambiguous the agent assumes the belief to be.
  • The nature (i.e., viewpoint) of the issue the agent assumes the belief addresses.
  • The agent’s assumptions about the second-order precepts and Existential Viewpoint beliefs, commitments, and predilections that affect their treatment of the belief.
  • How the four above characteristics interact.
• The guidance the belief actually provides, including:
  • The fundamental need(s) the agent’s approach to the belief allows it to satisfy.
  • How precise/ambiguous the belief actually is.
  • The nature (i.e., viewpoint) of the issue the belief addresses.
  • The second-order precepts and Existential Viewpoint beliefs, commitments, and predilections that affect the agent’s treatment of the belief.
  • How the four above characteristics interact.
• The differences between the assumptions and actualities (or realities) of the belief as listed above and the probable consequences of these differences.

CBA also urges security analysts to conduct similar inquiries into their own conclusions. Absent such queries, analysts are vulnerable to overlooking factors that may bias their judgments or dangerously inflate their confidence.

CBA offers a systematic approach to identifying the confidence beliefs merit while providing a unique perspective on the consequences of relying on beliefs for guidance they cannot provide. However, CBA does not claim attention to these issues affords an unbiased or exhaustive understanding of beliefs or agents. Its claim is more modest. Systematic attention to these issues, it holds, can enhance analysts’ self-awareness while helping them integrate and enrich insights drawn from other sources. Doing so can render analysts’ understanding of beliefs and agents more detailed and accurate and their confidence in that understanding more appropriate.

NOTES

1. Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1957). ↑

2. Barnet D. Feingold, “The Structure of Ultimate Love” (presentation, 123rd Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, August 7, 2015). ↑

3. Jurgen Habermas, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on Philosophical Justification,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, J. Habermas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 43-115. A detailed description of Habermas’s thoughts can be found at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/ (accessed October 6, 2021). ↑

4. Gustavo Perednik, La Judeofobia: Cómo y Cuándo Nace, Dónde y Por Qué Pervive, (Barcelona: Flor del Viento Ediciones, 2001), 26. Also see Gustavo Perednik, “Judeophobia - Anti-Semitism, Jew-Hate and anti- “Zionism,” Zionism and Israel Information Center, posted November 2, 2017, http://www.zionism-israel.com/his/judeophobia.htm (accessed October 6, 2021). ↑

5. Robert Merton, “The Self-Fulfilling Prophesy,” The Antioch Review. 1948, 198-210. ↑

6. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). ↑

7. Ibid.↑