Our culture has told us time and again, in inspirational posters, children’s movies, and beautiful books, that we can do anything if we only put our mind to it, if we only believe we can. We can change our destinies, we can change other people’s hardened hearts, we can even reshape our own bodies to the way we want them. We can be anything, do anything, accomplish anything, if only we believe in ourselves.
This is a LIE.
Believing in yourself will get you nowhere. A speaker once pointed out that Shaquille O’Neal can believe all he wants that he could be a jockey, but it will never happen, not even with extensive surgery. And my 4’11” roommate can believe all she wants that she will shoot up and grow past our 5’11” friend, but it will never happen. After fifteen years of ballet classes, I have stretched and changed my body enough that I am able to do splits and high kicks, but I will never be able to arch my back the way I want, because it is simply too tight. Believing all I want will not change the shape of my body.
If you believe in yourself, so the cultural “wisdom” goes, you can mold yourself. Not only your outer self, but your personality as well. That is a load of crap. When I was a kid, the other kids made fun of me for being so talkative; they called me annoying. People aren’t annoyed by it as much now, which is a good thing, because I can’t stop talking. When I was feeling hurt by kids calling me a loudmouth, I tried to stop talking so much. I put plenty of effort into it, and I had plenty of motivation, and I even really believed that I could become less gregarious. But it never happened. I cannot change my personality, and neither can you. Humans are incredibly powerless.
If your neighbor is determined to be racist, or a drunk, or a druggie, or anything else, no matter how hard you try and how much you believe in yourself, or even in them, you will never be able to change them.
We think we can change our futures. If we work hard enough, if we only believe in ourselves and persevere, we can be millionaires! We can pull ourselves out of our situations and change our lives. Talk to anyone who has ever been majorly disabled in an accident if you want to know just how little power we have over our futures. There is only so much we can do to change our lives.
And the worst part about this belief, is that it makes us cruel to others. We discount extenuating circumstances, and we automatically believe that the hardship that falls on others or the bad things they do are their own fault. Any psychologist will tell you that it’s true: when we look at our own faults or situation, we blame it on circumstances, but if we look at others’, we blame it on them. It's called "self-serving bias" (part of attribution theory), and it's so prevalent and practically unconscious, we don't even notice it most of the time.
One of the few groups that it is considered socially acceptable to look down on in our society is the overweight, because our culture has conditioned us to say, “It’s their own fault they’re fat. Why don’t they do some exercise?” and a ton of teeny-bopper movies about the ugly duckling turning into the beautiful swan causes us to say, “If that girl would only put some effort into herself—get some new clothes, learn about makeup, get contacts—she wouldn’t be so ugly.” As a perceptive comedic writer once said, “Sometimes the ugly duckling just grows up into an ugly duck.” True, we consciously know that it’s mean to call people fat and ugly, but we still have that sneaking little voice in the back of our heads saying it anyway.
And it’s not just our physical selves we’ve been falsely told that we can change. People who aren’t quite as intelligent as some of their peers get blamed for their lack of understanding. We also consciously fight against this one, but the little voice in our heads says, “If they’d only study and put some work into it, they wouldn’t be so stupid!”
And if someone has been downtrodden all their lives by circumstance, we look down on them! We say, “If only they had tried harder!” when really, trying all they wanted might never have helped in the least.
Anyone who has ever said that man is lord of creation needs to get a new pair of glasses, because that is the fuzziest and most distorted statement I have ever heard. We are not all-powerful. We cannot change others, we cannot change the future, we cannot change circumstance, we cannot change our physical, mental, emotional selves at all. We are almost powerless. Man is a tiny ant compared to the size of the universe. We will never be able to achieve through self-belief any more than we could move the sun by believing we can.
It’s a lie. And it is destroying us and destroying our love for others. It’s all-pervading; you almost can’t get away from it. It is everywhere. Even a beautiful children’s movie that I love includes a song which goes, “Who knows what miracles you can achieve/ When you believe/ Somehow you will/ You will when you believe” (Prince of Egypt, emphasis mine). Let me tell you something: the dictionary defines “miracle” as, “An event that appears inexplicable by the laws of nature and so is held to be supernatural in origin or an act of God: “Miracles are spontaneous, they cannot be summoned, but come of themselves” (Katherine Anne Porter).” By their very definition, a human cannot achieve a miracle.
Believing in yourself will get you nowhere.
