Before you could think critically, you were given a set of conclusions. Family handed you a version of reality. Religion handed you a framework. Culture handed you a set of values and a set of enemies. Fear handed you a list of things to avoid.
You absorbed all of it before you had the tools to question any of it. These conclusions became your beliefs. Your beliefs became your identity. Your identity became something you protect. When someone challenges the belief, it does not feel like an intellectual disagreement. It feels like an attack on you. You feel it in the body. The tightening. The need to respond. The discomfort that does not go away until the threat is neutralised.
You are defending a script you did not write. The people who wrote it are not here. The rooms where you learned it no longer exist. But the defence mechanism runs anyway, because it was built into you before you knew what was happening. Most people never audit this.
They go through life assuming their beliefs are theirs because they believe them. But believing something is not the same as choosing it. You can hold a position your whole life and still have arrived at it by accident.
The question is not whether your beliefs are correct. The question is whether you have ever actually looked at them. Or whether you are still defending something handed to you by people who were themselves defending something handed to them.
Vickram Aadityaa | vickram.au
