Beliefs are like forts, we build around us. They give us a semblance of safety & comfort – strong walls, clear boundaries.
But effectively, over time, they keep us locked inside – those walls can become our cage. We stop questioning, stop exploring. The safety they offer is static.
Theories are like nomadic hutments, might not be as secure. But the openness and lack of perceptible security creates a barrier free perspective – a dynamism. They evolve, adapt and invite possibility. It effectively induce optionality and opportunism to move to greener pastures!
The “attacks” are tests — and surviving them makes the theory stronger, or nudges us toward better ones.
We live in a world shaped by both beliefs and theories, yet we often fail to see how vastly different these two cognitive structures are. Beliefs are mental strongholds. We build them to protect our sense of identity, order, and meaning. But while they offer stability, they often come at the cost of mobility. Theories, in contrast, are flexible shelters — temporary constructs that allow us to move, adapt, and respond to the environment. They are vulnerable to attack, but that very vulnerability is what makes them powerful.
Beliefs: The Comforting Trap
Beliefs are easy to form and hard to let go. Once internalized, they feel like unshakable truths. But more often than not, they are inherited rather than chosen, defended rather than examined. Dogma — the unquestioning adherence to beliefs — is the result. Dogma does not welcome inquiry. It resists change. It punishes deviation. A belief is actually a resistance to change & nimble-footedness.
History is littered with examples of how dogmatic belief systems have obstructed human progress. The most notorious example is the Church’s resistance to heliocentrism. For centuries, belief in a geocentric universe — with Earth at the center — was held as sacrosanct truth. Galileo’s telescopic observations challenged this belief, but instead of being welcomed as scientific progress, they were branded heresy. He was forced to recant and placed under house arrest. Here, the “fort” of belief stifled the exploratory spirit of science.
In medicine, too, dogma has done damage. For centuries, the theory of “humors” dominated Western medicine. Any deviation from this belief was treated as quackery. Bloodletting, based on this outdated belief, persisted long after it had been disproven, often doing more harm than good. It took empirical theories and rigorous testing to finally move past it.
“Truth is often hard to come by and once found it may be easily lost again. Erroneous beliefs may have astonishing power to survive for thousands of years in defiance of experience and without the aid of any conspiracy.” – Karl Popper’s Lecture, “On the Sources of Knowledge & Ignorance”
Theories: Fragile, but Freeing
Theories, unlike beliefs, are not claims to certainty. They are simply our best availabe explanations— models that work until they are replaced by better ones. And herein lies their power. A theory is open to falsification. It doesn’t claim eternal truth, only utility for the present moment.
Take Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation. For over two centuries, they served as the backbone of physics. They were never believed in as absolute dogma, but rather used because they worked. And they did — they helped us understand planetary orbits, build bridges, and eventually, launch rockets. Even though they were later superseded by Einstein’s theories of relativity, Newton’s ideas remain incredibly useful. They are wrong — but useful.
Contrast this with ancient beliefs about the moon being a divine chariot or an egg. These beliefs may have held symbolic value but offered no predictive or explanatory power. Newton’s theories, though imperfect, allowed us to land on the moon. Beliefs made the moon sacred; theories made it reachable.
Pragmatism and the Utility of Ideas
William James, the American philosopher and psychologist, proposed the philosophy of pragmatism — the idea that the value of a belief lies not in its correspondence to some ultimate truth, but in its practical consequences. If an idea works, if it helps us navigate reality better, it is worth holding — for now.
This is the essence of treating theories as nomadic hutments. We occupy them as long as they serve us. When they stop serving us, we move. We are not emotionally attached to them. We are intellectually invested in them, but only as long as they are useful.
In economics, for instance, the belief in markets as “always efficient” was once treated almost as gospel. The 2008 financial crisis shattered that dogma. Theories of behavioral economics, which acknowledge human irrationality, emerged stronger in response. The transition from one theory to another was not seamless — but it was necessary, and ultimately, fruitful.
“Rationality as a personal attitude is the attitude of readiness to correct one’s beliefs. In its intellectually most highly developed form it is the readiness to discuss one’s beliefs critically, and to correct them in the light of critical discussions with other people.” – Karl Popper
The thing they call ‘knowledge’, namely justified belief, is a chimera. It is unattainable to humans except in the form of self-deception (the state of being perfectly secure in one’s beliefs); it is unnecessary for any good purpose; and it is undesired by the wisest among mortals. – David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
Here’s The Thing
I think Karl Popper said something like this somewhere (paraphrasing),
“A belief is never rational, suspension of belief is!”
To live intelligently is to stay open. We must resist the lure of rigid belief systems and instead cultivate a flexible mindset — one that is always willing to revise, rethink, and relocate. Forts can make us feel safe, but they are also prisons. Hutments may be exposed, but they allow us to keep moving.
Let us not seek certainty in an uncertain world. Let us instead seek utility, clarity, and adaptability. Let us trade dogma for pragmatism, and belief for provisional theory.
After all, the moon was not reached by holding onto myths, but by letting them go!