THE EVIL OF INTOLERANT BELIEFS

Oslo, Norway— another tragedy in our world. Another madman with a very crazy mental map doing lots of harm and destruction and seemingly obvious to the belief frame driving the evil that he has created.

So what’s the problem? Faith is not the problem. Nor are beliefs the problem. Nor even stupid and prejudicial ideas like those that Anders Breivik had in his head. Lots of people have all kinds of stupid and even ugly ideas in their heads but never act on them. Thank God! Mere ignorance or stupidity doesn’t create the kind of evil that we saw in the massacre in Oslo. So what does?

The problem with people who become the fanatics who do evil is this: They believe in their beliefs. They believe in the rightness, correctness, and truthfulness of their beliefs and it is this that makes them closed to the possibility that they could be wrong. They do not even have the realization that they are “believers” and that what they “know” isn’t absolute, but just a belief, a mental map, a perspective. They believe-in-their-beliefs and that closes them to new learnings. It closes them to an open discussion. It closes them to anything that might create doubt in their absolutist beliefs. This is the structure of fanaticism: A person moves beyond believing something to believing-in-the-belief. Then absolutely and unquestionably believing-in-the-belief.

So absolutely believing in their beliefs, they do not question themselves or entertain a doubt that they shouldn’t act on the belief. One quote from Breivik—he said that he was “the judge, jury, and executor.” It is this kind of belief-in-your-belief that drives one to impose on others not realizing that one is acting on a mere fallible belief. This is what makes them fundamentalists or as Bob Bodenhamer pronounces it, fundamentalists.

So again this past weekend, we saw another fundamentalist and fanatic do evil in the name of thinking that he was doing good. Anders Behring Breivik murdered 76 people in Oslo Norway out of his distorted thinking and believing. Believing as he told the court that he was “saving Europe from Muslim immigration,” he engaged in the evil of murder and called it revolution. He murdered and denied it is criminal! How insane is that?

Now, like the Isalm fundamentalists (like Al-Qaida) who murdered the 3,000 on 9/11, here is a right-wing fundamentalist on the other side who similarly has no tolerance for those who differ from him, and who thinks he will somehow do good by doing evil.

All that’s the bad news. So what can we do about this? One thing is to not give Breivik, or

anyone like him, any platform for his cause. To give him air time is to gives his absolutist beliefs credence. While I don’t expect it, I would love to see the news media worldwide dismiss him as a nut-case and not give his “manifesto” a single minute of attention. He’s had his fifteen minutes of fame, he shouldn’t get a second more. It only encourages fanatics like him. May the media be more responsible!

We also need to encourage deep democracy everywhere— that all people are the same, they are people, human beings, and that there is only one race on this planet— the human race. Highlighting differences, and especially the most superficial differences like skin color or different family similarities, creates a frame of “us” against “them” only to our detriment. And to handle our differences, we have to create models and processes for having great conversations that openly, respectfully, and curiously explore different points of view.

This is where Neuro-Semantic NLP offers something truly powerful: a communication model based on rapport, respect, seeking first to understand, the realization that we all operate from our models of the world, that all thinking and believing is fallible, and that we can learn to be agreeable in our disagreements. We can also intentionally and consciously meta-state our disagreements with respect, honor, curiosity, fallibility, etc. so that we can talk through “hot” subjects without becoming enemies.

Yes, this goes against lots and lots of cultural frames as well as the frames that the media everywhere operates from. What is typical in disagreements is fifth-grade mentality: name calling, labeling, mis-representing each other’s positions, creating “straw men” arguments of their opponents, over-generalizing, exaggerating the other’s position, awfulizing about all of the terrible things that will happen in the future, etc.

What to do? Where to start? Let’s start with ourselves. Let’s take more seriously the foundational communication skills of listening to those we disagree with and do with respect and curiosity. Let’s make sure we communicate from our best states and invite the best states from our communication partners. Let’s always be tentative knowing that all of our “knowledge” is fallible, liable to error, so that we inquire more than assert or command. Let’s be good models of how to work through a conflict and how to disagree respectfully. Let’s not now or ever believe- in-our-beliefs, but merely believe and stay open to the ever-present fallibility of our beliefs!