I’m advancing the idea that humility is an essential state in which the human mind can exist allowing it to detect and correct errors of the process of perception and construction of the reality.
Learning and exercising being humble is an essential activity that a mind should be engaged in continuously and ardently. Humility’s foundations are in the mind’s ability to distinguish real from imaginary, also known as telling factual from fictional information.
I believe that the words ‘humble’ and ‘humility’ are some of the most misunderstood words and concepts. In this article, I’m trying to analyze and show the strength hidden underneath the surface for humble minds.
I think that the confusion comes from current definitions focusing on describing how a humble person behaves or looks instead of how it thinks or even more important how the pipeline of sensing and making sense of reality works (check images below or simply search the internet).
The humble view of the world is usually an integrative and balanced one where each individual is respected, protected, and cherished at the same level as any mind group all forming a strong knitted social fabric.
In this context the opposite of humble behavior is hubris or narcissistic behavior.
A narcissistic mind believes that it is (statistically speaking) correct all the time. As a consequence, it needs no error correction process since in its view there are no errors to correct.
A narcissistic view of reality is usually one detached from reality that only intersects with the actual reality from time to time in the same way a broken (analog) clock is right twice a day.
For a narcissistic mind, facts are just annoying events that they usually blame to the actions of other minds that are “up to get me” or to destroy my “well-groomed” view of the world.
In a narcissistic mind the “I” is imperative as this “I” and only it has all the answers to all questions (or most of them anyway) and everyone else like other “I”s and groups must obey its power and awe.
In a nutshell, extreme narcissistic personalities are malignant states in which minds can exist and if given power over others can and will most likely destroy the social fabric of any group unless are kept under control.
The mistake many of us make when trying to understand humility is to confuse humble with weak. We may think that if someone answers a question by starting with “I’m not totally sure but here is what I know…” instead of “This is how it is” or “This is how it works”, the usual “know it all” answer, we consider them weak, unsure of themselves and sometimes simply stupid.
Once someone uttered “This is how it is” suggesting that they are in the possession of the full information set describing how reality works with zero mistakes they will put themselves in a biassed state that will make it hard if not impossible to come back later with new insights correcting previews insights in how things work around us.
If a powerful person, a leader is not humble enough its biased views will transmit and bias further minds that took the information provided by the leader “as is”, with no verification of their own. This process stands at the core of building all non-democratic societies and can lead to straight tyrannies that lead to the unimaginable suffering of all life.
In a few words: A chronic lack of humility can lead to “Hell on Earth”.
In any human society, the natural process of generating minds will tend to generate a diverse set. Nature will generate both natively inclined humble as well as narcissistic inclined minds and in the middle minds that can slide towards one end of the other of the humble-narcissistic axis.
This process is somewhat equivalent to how multicellular living entities work (humans, animals etc), cells are continuously created from the information stored in the DNA and RNA strands and each new cell is slightly different from the ones before it.
Sometimes the mutations are large and unruly cells are born. Those cells if left unchecked are in certain cases at the base of structures we call cancerous and if they get their way to combine in larger groups will lead to the destruction of the host organism and themselves.
The life span of any cellular group depends directly on its ability to detect those unruly cells and deny them the ability to destroy the larger group. The immune system is such a subsystem that in healthy organisms detect and fix or eliminate unruly individuals.
An yet the same immune system can become “unruly” itself when is unable to tell when a mutation can lead to a healthy evolution or lead to cancer and start to overreact and destroy the very organism it seeks to protect.
Autoimmune diseases are now better understood and it may just turn out that the deaths from Corona Virus 2019 (or #COVID19) may just be another example of the immune system going astray. I assume that an untrained immune system is probably more likely to make mistakes than a trained one.
What I’m trying to outline here is that there is no “silver bullet” and the key to our survival as individuals and as a group depends on our ability to find and correct errors in our process of navigating the Exoverse. In the diagram below the humble minds are more “anchored” in reality (Universe) with a healthy process of exploring the imaginary (Extraverse) whereas narcissistic ones are located more in the imagination (the imaginary space) than reality.
In conclusion, I believe that this is more about nurture than nature, and nurturing has to happen early in the process of mind formation. Unfortunately, we seem to be biassed there too as we willingly introduce errors in the young minds by presenting distorted versions of reality. We have a well-known expression for that, “lying to children” and it usually happens when older minds are not capable to find ways to train younger minds in how to deal with the real-imaginary process or simply put to explain how the Exoverse works.
This is not a pure criticism of parenthood or the social education systems. To be a parent is a difficult task (I’ve been one myself) when one’s time is burdened by the physical needs first. A parent must put food on the table a roof over the head and clothes on their children first. For some, even those can’t be achieved properly and the parents must spend most of their time in endless (sometimes meaningless) low-paid jobs in order to meet a minimal living standard for their children and themselves.
However, the Exoverse is an unforgiving place, full of wonders but also full of dangers. It does not care if you live or die and the only way to safely navigate it is to be able to master the art of telling fact from fiction, real form imaginary, or simply put to be Humble.
Seeking humility, I thank you for reading my article.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humble
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/humble
Article verification archive:Humble.zip
