“When you believe in things that you don’t understand then you suffer. Superstition ain’t the way.”
—Stevie Wonder
The university can be a hotbed for superstition. When you fill people’s heads with speculative ideas that are presented as facts, things will always get messy. Facts and metaphysical truths, when taken as sacred, become superstitions. When we make a professor more sacred than a book, or a book more sacred than a friend, or a friend more sacred than a lover, we are playing with fire. Making something sacred is a problem because when you don’t understand, when your gut tells you something is fishy, you can simply say: “Nope, better believe the preacher, doctor, monk, parent, novelist, counsellor, lover, professor, magician, swami, etc.” We’re addicted to this. Easy answers equal distraction from difficulties on the home front. We’re not in “the real world,” we have no real problems.
True, we want to help the world, which is a good thing. But it’s not a pass for us to be high and mighty with problems. When you don’t understand why you feel the way you do, you risk the loss of your gut, or your intuitions. You say: “There must be something wrong with my abilities,” or you look for some bigger existential problem to chew on endlessly. Or, you pay $5,000 dollars to fly to Africa to feed children, when the real problem is almost always at home. There are starving children in Montreal, too, and your boyfriend and parents have nothing to do with Nietzsche.
We sometimes tend to believe that when there are problems with us or with the world, that these problems are us or the world. We don’t trust that we understand the situation well enough to deal with it. It’s all very mystical and unreflective. The image of the superstitious person used to be the ignorant believer, the person who “took the red pill.” But the young thinker is just as susceptible. When things get difficult in school, we know that we can get a mental health note or an aderol. When we feel perplexed, we know we can read “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” or Plato. But these “answers” don’t make our “souls weigh more” at the end of it; they don’t make us better than anyone else.
Do we really have to rely on vague diagnoses, esoteric intellectuals, and wonder drugs to supplement our “feeble” minds? Some more relevant questions might be: Am I treating my roommates well? How’s grandma? Why does Brad’s room always smell funny?
When it comes down to it, belief comes from instinct and intuition, those vague and detestable, intangible things. We can’t read about the backs of our own heads.
As an exercise, ask yourself what you really got out of that literature or philosophy class, and then compare it to what you might get out of a Pixar movie or the advice of a good friend. Ask yourself why you dismiss the possibility of a Pixar movie being a source of real wisdom.
Facts, diagnoses, intellectuals and leather-bound books can often just provoke superstition, though they may add to our university street cred. That’s not to say that they’re always bad, they just have their place somewhere behind things we really do understand—friends, family and our sense of self; all those silly rank and file values.
