The Architecture of Mismatch: Why Your Assumptions Are the Engine of Your Pain
The least benefited issue is discussion whether your beliefs are "true" or "false" because there is no such thing as true beliefs. It is better to take a closer look at the assumptions that quietly generate our expectations. Departing from what we believe in does not mean that we stick exclusively to evolutionary views and reduce human behavior power games. Dominance is certainly part of human social life, but it is not the whole story. Humans also cooperate, form attachments, care for offspring, create institutions, and sometimes genuinely sacrifice for one another. Evolution selected for competition and cooperation because both increase persistence under different conditions.
Contrary to what it seems, the primary fact are not even evolutionary behaviou. The primary fact is that every organism is a finite process trying to maintain itself against entropy. Everything else grows from this. Assumptions are not arbitrary beliefs. They are components of the brain's predictive model. They tell the nervous system what kind of world it expects to inhabit. A child who repeatedly hears that family always loves unconditionally does not merely acquire a proposition. The child's nervous system begins predicting unconditional support. If reality later fails to match that prediction, suffering follows. The suffering is not produced by the truth itself but by the mismatch between the predictive model and reality (the unpleasant surprise). Exactly the same mechanism applies elsewhere.
If I assume my friends will always understand me, I will suffer when they do not. If I assume democracy means I can do whatever I want, I will suffer when laws, institutions, economics, and other people constrain me. If I assume free will means I can always choose otherwise, I will suffer when I discover the enormous influence of my genes, upbringing, nervous system, social environment, and current physiological state. The common mechanism is always the same. Hidden assumptions generate hidden expectations. Hidden expectations generate prediction errors. Prediction errors are experienced as disappointment, frustration, anger, or grief. It's pain.
We are not wounded by what the world did to you, but by the violent grinding of our hidden expectations against a reality that never agreed to our terms.
