When you’re doubting one of your most cherished beliefs, close your eyes, empty your mind, grit your teeth, and deliberately think about whatever hurts the most. Don’t rehearse standard objections whose standard counters would make you feel better. Ask yourself what smart people who disagree would say to your first reply, and your second reply. Whenever you catch yourself flinching away from an objection you fleetingly thought of, drag it out into the forefront of your mind. Punch yourself in the solar plexus. Stick a knife in your heart, and wiggle to widen the hole.
There are lots of things that make this especially difficult for certain sorts of beliefs. Here are a couple:
The smart objections to your belief may be difficult to find. There may actually be lots of stupid but popular objections to your belief; so in order to find the smart objections, you may have to do a good deal of unpleasant research deep behind enemy lines. If your belief is commonly ridiculed, and those who object to it typically denounce you as a scoundrel for even entertaining it, then good luck finding smart objections to it before you become too pissed-off to reason very successfully about them.
The smart objections to your belief may be written in a vocabulary you’re unfamiliar with. For instance, if your belief is about political economy (socialism or libertarianism, let’s say), you may actually need to get into some pretty serious economics to understand the smart objections. It is easy to state naïve beliefs about political economy whose best rebuttal is a technical one; sound-bite objections such as Bastiat’s parable of the broken window, or Keynes’ “markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent” are probably not the smartest objections.
There are lots of things that make this especially difficult for certain sorts of beliefs. Here are a couple:
The smart objections to your belief may be difficult to find. There may actually be lots of stupid but popular objections to your belief; so in order to find the smart objections, you may have to do a good deal of unpleasant research deep behind enemy lines. If your belief is commonly ridiculed, and those who object to it typically denounce you as a scoundrel for even entertaining it, then good luck finding smart objections to it before you become too pissed-off to reason very successfully about them.
The smart objections to your belief may be written in a vocabulary you’re unfamiliar with. For instance, if your belief is about political economy (socialism or libertarianism, let’s say), you may actually need to get into some pretty serious economics to understand the smart objections. It is easy to state naïve beliefs about political economy whose best rebuttal is a technical one; sound-bite objections such as Bastiat’s parable of the broken window, or Keynes’ “markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent” are probably not the smartest objections.