Welcome to The MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my 154th episode. In this episode I want to talk about two psychological errors which will negatively impact your life in a substantial way. You can also think of these as worldview malfunctions. These two mistakes are examples of you believing something which is inconsistent with reality and then acting upon it. When you act on a pathological belief reality will snap back and hurt you. Incorrect beliefs are often the source of unexplained negative emotion as well as relational dysfunction in a person’s life. You need to do as much work as you can to correct your beliefs because correcting your beliefs is one of the single biggest factors which determines whether you will live your best life. If you want to learn more about the power of belief you can go back and listen to MHB 55. For right now let’s focus on two mistakes you can fix to immediately make your own experience in life a whole lot better. These might sound cryptic and clinical at first, but bear with me as I unpack each of them. First is to practice proper and precise failure assessment with regards to your own self-evaluation. Second is to understand there is a correct and true way to walk through life. Like I said, kind of clinical, but let’s take it piece-by-piece in a way which is understandable.
Let’s unpack this idea of failure assessment. Have you ever seen one of those movies where something goes wrong on a spaceship and the astronauts are frantically trying to get the doors closed in order to contain the failure? Proper failure assessment is kind of like that. Imagine you try out for a sports team and you’re 100% certain you’ll make the cut. You’ve been playing this sport your whole life and everyone you know affirms how good you are at it. The day of the tryouts comes and you breeze through everything which is required of you. You get home and you start building your upcoming schedule around practices and games because, after all, you’re certain you made the cut. Maybe you even go out buy yourself some expensive equipment and it’s possible you’re already celebrating with friends and family. But a few days go by and you don’t hear anything from the coaches. Then one morning you wake up to a piece of mail which says you didn’t make the team.
As you read the rejection letter you try to make sense of it. That piece of mail causes many things to rush through your mind and most of them are not true. But you’re tempted to believe the worst of them. Maybe you’re not as good at this sport as you believed you were. If you’re not as good as you believed, what else are you fooling yourself about? How could all the people in your life be lying to you about your talent just to make you feel good? What else are they lying to you about? Are any of your relationships authentic? Does anyone respect you enough to tell you the truth? Does your wife secretly think you’re a loser? Is she attracted to other men who are more athletic than you? Maybe her late shifts on Wednesdays aren’t really being spent at work. You knew that guy from HR was a little too chatty with her. What kind of person must you be to allow all these people to fool you? You’ve been telling everyone that your passion is this sport but you couldn’t even make the team. Is you entire identity built on a lie? If you’re not even good enough to pursue your own purpose in life then why should you be living at all?
You can see how opening this one rejection letter can overturn your entire worldview if you allow it to. But here’s the problem with that. The reason you didn’t make the sports team is because you’re too talented and the manager knows a bigger team just going to poach you. The rejection letter you received is a form letter automatically generated and sent to everyone who didn’t make the cut. The manager was going to call you and tell you about this but his wife went into labor and he rushed off to the hospital – never being reminded of it again. All of those questions you asked yourself and all of the anxiety you caused through unwarranted doubts about yourself never had to happen. You made a whole collection of assumptions about yourself that weren’t true and you suffered real negative emotion as a consequence. Now imagine if you crafted habitual self-doubt which caused you to think like this over and over again every time something went wrong in your life. You’d be living under the constant, crushing scrutiny of tyrannical judges who are nothing but constructions of your own mind. This is not a pleasant way to live and believe me when I say it’s tempting to fall into this way of thinking and many, many people are already stuck there.
Now you may be used to hearing me tell you to put your own life together before blaming others or before blaming the system – and I hold firmly to that statement. Containing the spread of doubt associated with your failure might seem antithetical to the notion of personal responsibility but it’s not. The key here is getting to the truth of things. If you knew the truth about why you got the rejection letter then you wouldn’t have needed to react in such a world crushing manner. But what if I told you even when people have an accurate understanding of the truth they still face temptation to react to the lies? I hold to a biblical worldview and so I believe there are principalities and powers who are actively working to undermine your well-being and smother your future potential. I believe the temptation to succumb to the lies comes from these spirits. There’s something attractive about the idea that you’re just useless and miserable. The attractive part is that if you’re useless and miserable then nothing will be expected of you. You will have no responsibilities and you never have to fear being disappointed by failure in the future. I think this is in part why people take a failure from one aspect of their life and apply it to their entire identity. If you believe you’re just not meant to do anything special then you don’t have to get up and do anything special.
But there’s a problem with this approach. The problem is guilt. I don’t care how nihilistic you are, you cannot escape the guilt of unsatisfied potential. Since almost all of your sense of meaning comes from observing yourself moving towards a desired goal, if you abandon the goal entirely then all that’s left for you is the crushing feelings of meaninglessness and guilt. Many people refuse to embark on a journey towards a goal because they’re terrified of failing. One of the main reasons they are terrified of failing is because they don’t know how to appropriately assess failure. If I go golfing with Tom Brady and beat him that doesn’t mean Tom Brady is a terrible quarterback. But this is what we think of ourselves when we don’t assess our failures with laser-like precision. I can go into a meeting and say something really stupid but that doesn’t mean I’m a stupid person. The evidence which supports my intelligence is overwhelming so me saying a stupid thing during a meeting is the exception not the rule. When you assess your failures you need to make sure you assess them fairly and with precision. Don’t take a sledgehammer to your entire identity simply because you made a mistake unrelated to your identity.
This idea of failure containment is especially true with regards to your intimate relationships. You might get home one evening and discover your spouse is having an affair. This is a world-ending revelation because it causes you to question your past, your present, and your future. All of a sudden your home doesn’t feel like home anymore and the person you loved looks like a stranger. You were totally wrong about this person which means you were wrong about the memories you made with them, about the life you have with them, and about the future you had planned together. All of it was wrong. But even in such a tragic betrayal as this practicing precise failure containment is absolutely necessary. The affair might have been caused by something the two of you failed to address – but it’s possible your partner had his or her own problems from a history you didn’t know about.
Let’s say for the sake of example that the affair was a consequence of unresolved issues which the two of you could have done something about if you were paying closer attention. Even when you know you share some responsibility in the situation it’s important to remember the failure has been confined to this particular situation. The affair doesn’t mean every relationship after this one is going to result in the same kind of issue. There were particular and specific points of failure which brought about the affair so it’s important to discover what these were and be honest with yourself about them. Proper failure assessment means honestly squaring up with the areas where you’ve been insufficient and limiting your sense of guilt to those specific areas. Being cheated on doesn’t mean you’re a bad father or a bad mother, for example. If you practice proper failure assessment then you won’t be nearly as afraid to try new things you haven’t learned yet. Every time anyone is learning a new thing they are going to do it badly at first. But doing something badly won’t hurt you as much if you’re confining the shame of your mistakes to the specific areas where they happened. Beginning by doing things badly and then having the persistence to keep practicing is the key to becoming an expert at anything.
Improperly assessing your failures is the first mistake which will destroy your life. The second mistake involves postmodernism. The second mistake is thinking that there are an infinite number of ways to walk through life successfully. This worldview malfunction is particularly prevalent in our own generation – thus the name postmodernism. It might be true that there a near infinite number of ways to walk through life – but there is actually a tightly constrained path when it comes to navigating life successfully. You might say that no one agrees on the definition of success but that’s not true. Success definitely has to involve your own well-being and the well-being of others across time. This is not optional. If you’re not working for the well-being of yourself and others then what lies ahead of you is misery and death. If we can’t agree that misery is bad then it’s impossible for us to have a conversation because you’re being intellectually dishonest. If misery is universally bad then we must assume its opposite is universally good. The opposite of misery is well-being.
Before we further unpack the reasoning for why you should work for the well-being of yourself and others let’s think about some of the problems associated with a postmodern viewpoint. One obvious problem is that it’s impossible to organize a society when no one can agree on what’s right and what’s wrong. This kind of confusion can become so pervasive that adherents of postmodernism begin to question the existence of objective truth itself. If you don’t believe that anything is true outside of each individual’s opinion, then there’s no reason to have a conversation apart from garnering power for yourself or for the group whose opinion you represent. I mean the purpose of the conversation can’t be to further understand the truth because the truth doesn’t exist. If you throw out objective truth then everything comes down to personal opinion and whoever has the biggest mob wins the day. This is why postmodernists argue in support of censorship and why they label opinions which disagree with their own as hate speech. The postmodern worldview is not one of civility or respect – anything goes when in pursuit of power. You’ll find it interesting to note the postmodernist fails to attribute objective truth to anything but somehow they believe in the objective reality of power. I think this cognitive dissonance betrays the motivation behind their adoption of radical subjectivity to begin with. Even the most ardent postmodernist cannot maneuver the world without holding a first principle or a highest value – but for them their god is self-empowerment.
Not only is it impossible to form well-functioning societies without broad-scale agreement on objective truth, but as an individual you can’t even navigate your own life this way. You need a structure of values in order to perceive the world. You can only focus on one thing at a time so even choosing what to look at with your eyes is predicated on your value system. You are a creature of aim and so you aim at what you desire and tools which will help you in the pursuit of your goals. Your values are built on the foundation of what you believe about the world so if you believe things which aren’t objectively true then your aim will not align with the reality of your existence. Pursuing an incorrect aim will be like putting chocolate milk into your car’s fuel tank instead of gasoline. You can hope and pray with all your heart that your car will run on chocolate milk – but there’s an objective reality to your car in that its engine is designed to run on gasoline. So even if you want to believe that everything will be okay the engine will still break down if you ignore this objective truth. Life functions in the same manner. There is an objective truth to life which holds true regardless of your own personal experience or preferences. If you disregard this objective structure then your inputs of decision-making and action will result in undesired outputs of consequences.
It’s also incredibly difficult to discover your own calling in life if you hold to a postmodern worldview. One reason is because postmodernism and nihilism fall hand-in-hand so it’s difficult to maintain a sense of meaning day-to-day when in the back of your mind you believe everything is ultimately meaningless. But another reason has to do with option paralysis. If you believe there are an infinite number of ways to walk through life then it’ll be too difficult for you to narrow your options enough to focus on one thing. It takes a long time to become a master at something. Becoming a master requires tens of thousands of hours and many of these hours will be spent grinding when you don’t feel like it. Becoming a master also means holding to something deeply enough to experience failure after failure without falling into discouragement. Perseverance is difficult any time you fail at something but it’s nearly impossible when you fail at something you’re already not passionate about.
Discovering your passion and having the fortitude to persevere as you pursue it is one of the key elements to living a good and successful life. Discovering your passion becomes a lot easier once you account for objective truth in reality. Your passion needs to be something which promotes your own well-being across time as well as the well-being of others across time. Fitting your passion into this criteria radically reduces your options and helps you find your calling. You might be passionate about playing video games, but you know by observing the world that this passion is not tantamount to the well-being of yourself and others across time unless you do something like become a professional gamer or work in game design. There are tight constraints on the ways in which video games can function as a calling in your life. This should seem obvious, but the postmodern viewpoint suggests you should be able to sit on your couch and binge games for hours without consequence. If the world doesn’t like your self-serving addiction then the world needs to change and be more tolerant of you. But the objective truth is that the world will not change and your addiction will simply serve to make you miserable until it kills you.
It will make you miserable because whether you like it or not you are designed to live in a well-ordered society. You need other people to maintain your own sanity and survival. You use the feedback of others as a barometer for your own mental health. This is why solitary confinement is so difficult for people and so often leads to mental health breakdowns. Community and relationships with other people are not optional. Every community requires reciprocal behavior. This means you can’t expect the community to embrace you just because of who you are. If you walk around like an arrogant tyrant who never adds value to the lives of others your relationships will fail and your community will reject you. You can pretend like you’re okay with this rejection, blame the community instead of looking at yourself, and then go out and act like a lone-wolf – but the objective truth about yourself is that you’re not (nor can you be) a lone-wolf. You depend on the work and the production of others for your own physical survival. If somehow you manage physical survival purely on your own then your spirit will begin to deteriorate because your spirit is designed to live in community with others.
But what happens if the entire society begins to reject reality? This is called collective psychosis and the process is well-documented throughout history. Deceptive teachers construct a narrative which is inconsistent with reality and a large segment of the population buys in. A good example is Marxism. The thesis behind Marxism is that utopia can be achieved if socioeconomic classes are eliminated. This claim depends on the premise that hierarchy is nothing but a social construction. It also depends on all suffering being the consequence of social malfeasance. Marxism is inconsistent with reality on both of its fundamental premises. Let’s consider hierarchy. The Marxists believe hierarchy is a human construction but Price’s Law demonstrates otherwise. Price’s Law, also called the Pareto Distribution, proves that 80% of the creative resource will collect around the top 20% of performers given enough time. This happens all over the universe even in places where humanity has never been. It’s a rule which is baked into reality. No matter how much the Marxists wish they could do away with hierarchies, the universe itself will not allow them to.
The other major point where Marx was wrong was regarding human suffering. To suggest human suffering is fully associated with social construction ignores phenomena like cancer, natural predation, and entropy. Entropy is a big one here. The entire universe is constantly moving from a state of order to disorder – it’s also getting colder. Entropy is why after enough time passes you need to put a new roof on your house. It’s also why you need to eat food in order to survive for a long period of time. The universe is bound to a pervasive state of decay and we must constantly work in order to maintain ourselves and others while we are here in it. Entropy has nothing to do with human social constructions. Even if a society could get Marxism perfectly right and usher in the famous utopia – there would still be the problems of entropy, illness, natural predation, and human evil.
When entire populations fail to account for these realities because they’re lost in a fantasy then all hell breaks loose. Each individual fails to conduct him or herself in accordance with what’s true and the whole thing becomes dysfunctional and unstable. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you refuse to accept that there’s an objective truth which exists outside of your own opinions and preferences. What you do in this world matters and will have a direct impact on your quality of life. In the western world, our refusal to acknowledge this has backed us into a corner where a huge segment of the population will not take responsibility for truth and when things go badly as a consequence they simply blame the state for being corrupt. Becoming a resentful, bitter, helpless victim is the logical outcome of making these two mistakes in your life. This kind of person has allowed their own personal failures to flood the entire world instead of being disciplined and precise in their assessment of what went wrong. Instead of fixing the small area of their life in which they failed, they’ve allowed their guilt and resentment to run rampant and have declared that the nation itself is fundamentally broken. Couple this inappropriate assessment of failure with a postmodern view of the world and you have a recipe for disaster.
America is the best country this world has ever known. It is the most prosperous, safest, least racist society in history. This is a demonstrable fact supported by overwhelming evidence. And there is an army of people who want nothing more than to destroy the system and rebuild it in their own image. They want this because they’ve allowed their own failures to infect every aspect of their perception until they believe the system itself has failed. They don’t believe in the principles upon which the American system was founded because these principles depend on the existence of objective reality. Objective reality requires adaptation and conformity and the postmodernist hates nothing more than that. They believe their own personal view of the world is canonical and therefore the system (which they believe has failed) should be torn down and reconstructed according to what they believe about the world – and to hell with all the data and all the evidence which suggests their view of the world is incorrect.
Two of the most important things you can do in life are learning how to properly evaluate your own failures and understanding that there is a right way to live in this world. If you can do these two things and avoid the mistake of not doing them, then you will maximize the possibility of living your best life. You’ll discover that your life is characterized by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And then – if you keep pursuing these good things – you’ll discover that they are also the characteristics of Jesus Christ who is the Lord and Savior of all who come to Him by faith.
If you enjoy this podcast, please rate it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to it. You can follow The MHB Podcast on Facebook or Twitter @mhbpodcast. Tell your friends about it and share it on social media. If you’d like email notifications of new episodes or if you’d like to support my work directly, please consider becoming a paid subscriber on my website at mhbpodcast.com. This work is made possible by listener support so your generosity is greatly appreciated. Thank you all for joining me, and I will see you in the next episode.
The MHB Podcast 