There’s a pattern that I have noticed so many times, that if someone asks me what’s the most fundamental thing I have figured out myself, I would tell this.

Most of human behavior is stuck in re-enforcement cycle. People model human behavior based on their observation and then build systems based on those models, and those systems end up influencing how humans behave, without the initial observers realizing that the behavior they observed initially was itself influenced by the previous systems (or environment) those people were living in. A lot of man-made systems work not because they were based upon models of human behavior that were fundamentally true, rather because these systems can shape human behavior to fit accordingly. These systems are self-fulfilling prophecies. In other words, if people have a collective belief about human behavior, that belief will become true, because everyone would behave as if it was true, in result prompting people to behave that way even if they originally wouldn’t.

I first noticed this phenomenon while studying economics where it was assumed that work is a “bad” — something that people dislike in itself but do so because it earns them something (income in this case) that they like by a greater degree. This assumption was irritating for me because the kind of people I admired were all those who loved their work, and so I objected on this assumption. I was told that there are certainly exceptions but this is what explains the behavior of most people. They were right about that, but what they got wrong was that they built whole economic theories on this assumption without ever questioning whether work is fundamentally a “bad” or whether most people do a primary work that they dislike because it’s the system-default and they never put much thoughts or efforts into finding an alternative ¹. This belief probably wouldn’t have caused any problem if only a few individuals believed it, but when everybody believes that work is a necessary evil for earning bread, you see rise of what David Graeber calls bullshit jobs — meaningless jobs that only support other meaningless jobs where people are doing useless busywork thinking they are doing real work.

But it was soon enough that I started noticing this pattern at other places. Money is just whatever people believe will be accepted as a medium of exchange. In financial markets, an asset will become “valuable” if a lot of people believe it is valuable. If people expect inflation to happen, it will happen.

Beyond economics, consider how we raise our children. Most people believe children are dumb. Even if people don’t say it out loud, they treat them this way, including their own parents ². Schools are designed on the same premise that children are stupid and very slow-progressing. Unsurprisingly, a lot of children do end up being stupid and slow-progressing, because that’s how schools handle them. Now, I am presenting this phenomenon it in the right order, otherwise someone’s first observation would be that children are stupid and slow-progressing, and then will see schools designed on the same premise and will be satisfied that schools are well-designed for society’s needs ³.

A rather unexpected case of this phenomenon was something I realized relatively recently while watching an Adam Curtis documentary. The reason sexuality more influentially shapes people’s lives in US than in countries like Pakistan is because Edward Bernays — nephew of Sigmund Freud — had employed Freud’s sexuality-centered psychology theories in shaping public perception in US on a massive level during his work for big corporations and the government. Freud is a leading figure in psychology probably not because his theories were fundamentally true but because some people in power believed they were true and built systems based on his theories that influenced human behavior, thus turning them true as a consequence.

Coming back to the main idea of how these systems and beliefs are self-fulfilling prophecies. I was talking about this phenomenon in the parenting context with someone when this idea connected with another thought that I was thinking independently but was related to the same idea.

This self-fulfilling pattern not only applies to beliefs of groups of people in authority ⁴, but also to beliefs one individually holds.

A lot of beliefs are such that they would be true if you believe them to be true and would be false if you believe them to be false. A simple example is that if you think a university degree is important for good livelihood, university degree will most likely end up being important for your livelihood because you won’t spend time doing things that could improve your livelihood more than your university degree. Same case applies if you replace university degree with skills, connections, or your zodiac sign.

Another example is one’s perception of being blessed or miserable. If someone thinks their life is miserable, it is miserable regardless of how good it is by objective measures, because one’s standards of living don’t matter if one doesn’t feel content with their life. Blessedness is only real if perceived.

Similarly, people who think that they could become exponentially better in something if they put in the required time and effort, are the only ones who actually end being seriously good in that thing ⁵ because others never risk investing that much time and effort ⁶.

Now, the apparent conclusion from noticing this pattern might be that perception and beliefs are all that matter, and we should thus shift all our focus on shaping these beliefs.

But this is incomplete thinking. Focusing on just beliefs works only if there is no fundamental truth about reality. And if there is no fundamental truth about reality, why do financial bubbles burst, and markets take correction? Why do societies fall after their glorious rise? Why do homeschooled kids outperform schooled kids? Why do some people get to spend most of their lives doing what they love while others spend most of their lives doing what they hate? Why do people who believe true understanding of things is better than hacking for exams end up feeling better about what they do in lives and vice versa for those who think otherwise?

The simple answer is that there exists a fundamental truth, but it will benefit you only if you believe it to be true. On the other hand, if you believe what’s not fundamentally true, you might still feel that your beliefs are true without ever realizing you could have done so better if only you believed in what was fundamentally true.

1. It might be that at a certain point in history that for most people, there were no alternatives to working in agriculture or similar occupations even if they disliked it because technology wasn’t advanced enough and reaching production levels necessary for survival needed putting in a lot more amount of work in certain areas regardless of whether people liked them or not. But with technological progress, this certainly ceased to be the case, but the default systems persisted and people continued to believe that working on things they don’t find interesting is necessary for survival. ↩︎
2. I theorize that the reason kids continue doing baby-ish activities these days is because parents like the baby version of their children and thus do not train their kids to act mature and take responsibility for things — but this is probably a discussion for another essay. ↩︎
3. Fourteen-year old Aaron Swartz had figured out the absurdity of how children were treated and you could feel his resentment in his essay explaining it. ↩︎
4. For most part of history, these group of people were those who held power, because they directed the flow of information. But with tools of mass spread of information, this can now be individuals with otherwise no power who somehow happen to gain mimetic virality. ↩︎
5. Visa’s examples of serious people are also an example of this. ↩︎
6. An exception for this is when individuals are so absorbed in that thing that they don’t even bother thinking about how good they can be at it or the consequences of them failing to be good at it. They simply don’t care about the secondary things at all. ↩︎