f0rrest | adaptivism: a very short introduction (Reply)

I’ve been thinking recently about this rigid duality we find ourselves in. I look around and see black-and-white systems all over the place. I see strict ideologies adhered to even when the situation doesn’t warrant them. I see people identifying as Christian or atheist, male or female, black or white, liberal or conservative, introvert or extrovert, optimist or pessimist, realist or relativist, and so on. I see people clinging to these systems even when they’ve long stopped producing good outcomes, either because the people themselves have been indoctrinated into these systems since birth or because they refuse to admit when they’re wrong; and I suspect it’s mostly the latter, because we all know people hate to admit when they’re wrong; they dig in their heels, double down, rationalize their bullshit in all sorts of ways, just to avoid having to admit that, maybe, just maybe, their belief system might not work in every single situation.

That’s why I’m working on a philosophical framework with which it is impossible to be wrong, and I hope to flesh out this framework by writing this Very Short Introduction. So, with that being said, please bear with me, because this idea is very nascent, as in I’ve only been thinking about it for a few weeks, meaning it probably needs far more thought work to become fully coherent, and, if it were fully coherent, it would likely need far more than 2316 words to fully explain it, not to mention fully tackling all the ethical implications that might arise from its widespread adoption. But let’s be real here, no one is going to adopt some weird philosophical framework found only in some random online journal, so this Very Short Introduction should suffice for now.

Like I was typing, people hate to admit when they’re wrong. This refusal to admit wrongness, at least in terms of belief systems, seems to be rooted in this concept we call “truth.” People believe things to be true, and if something is true, how can it be wrong? And because we believe certain things to be true, many of us refuse to change our beliefs or hold contradicting beliefs; for example, a devout Christian would never believe in Odin, a determinist would never believe that we have free will, an atheist would never believe in a personal god, a strict materialist would never believe in an immortal soul, a solipsist would never believe that other minds exist, a nihilist would never believe in inherent meaning, and so forth. For people with hardline beliefs, changing their beliefs or entertaining conflicting beliefs feels like a sort of betrayal of one’s values, creating a sort of cognitive dissonance, a disharmony in the mind.

But what if it didn’t have to?

The problem with “truth” is that it’s just a word, a concept, an idea thought up by humans, for humans. The universe did not come preloaded with an app called “truth,” at least in terms of belief systems. The universe just is, with or without you. This idea of “truth” is almost like a psychic defense mechanism, to help us make sense of the world, to help us grapple with the fact that we might just be tiny, insignificant specks of stardust floating around in a deep, dark, scary void. We like to believe life has meaning, and “truth” gives us that meaning. And many would argue that this idea of “truth” is helpful in some way, that it provides some utility; with it, we can agree on certain things that might be “true,” per our own concept of truth, like a tree being a tree, or a cat being different from a human, or a PlayStation 5’s processor being faster than a Switch 2’s processor, and so forth, but in each of these examples, humans are making the categories, coming up with the definitions for those categories, and then assigning a “truth value” based on those human-centric definitions. This process of assigning categories and truths is usually through a collective effort appealing to utility, for example, we all seem to agree that it’s useful to separate the animal we perceive as a “cat” from the animal we perceive as a “human” because we observe substantial differences between these two animals, but these “differences” are interpreted through a human-centric lens via our five senses, which we all know cannot be fully trusted, as human biology has a vested interest in interpreting the universe in such a way that benefits only itself. Biology is biased. All this is to say that “truth,” at least in terms of belief systems, is far more malleable than we like to think. A large portion of what we believe to be true is dictated by words, language games, semantics, whatever you want to call it, and we all know that the meaning of words can, and do, change based entirely on the whims of the collective. This isn’t always problematic, but it becomes problematic when it’s applied to more nebulous belief systems, e.g. religion and philosophy, because here we are, in the year 2026 of our Lord, killing or being killed simply because of our beliefs; and I’m not just talking about “holy war” stuff, which is the most obvious example of killing and being killed simply because of a belief, but stuff like putting spikes on park benches so that homeless people can’t sleep on them, or refusing to increase the federal minimum wage, or cutting social safety-net programs, or refusing certain medical treatments, all because of some religious and/or sociopolitical belief we have. In this way, “beliefs,” which are rooted in this nebulous idea of “truth,” have the potential to cause great harm.

But it does not have to be this way.

What then is a boy to do? Should we reject “truth” altogether? No. I don’t think so. One, rejecting truth is itself a sort of paradoxical truth statement, and two, “truth,” as we covered, has some utility, even if most of it is based on words and definitions. Instead, I think we should use the semantics to our advantage and tweak the meaning of the word “truth.” Right now, the word “true” means something like, “in accordance with fact or reality,” with the baked-in assumption that, in the future, “fact or reality” will remain consistent. But I posit that reality is not so consistent, at least not “experienced reality.”

For example, a strict capitalist society may have experienced great success in the realm of technological advancement, which may have had some positive benefits for those living in said society, but later on, when the wealth gap was wider than the Grand Canyon, that capitalist system was no longer providing good outcomes for many people. Another example would be a chaotic, immoral society that may have developed a religion that imposed strict moral guidelines which improved the overall well-being of those in the society, but, at a certain point, when people weren’t constantly stealing or murdering each other anymore, some of those same religious guidelines may have become overly restrictive or misaligned with the society’s new stability, limiting individual freedom rather than protecting it, think stuff like “no same-sex marriage” or the various rigid gender roles imposed by Christianity. In both of these scenarios, the belief system has run its course and needs to be adapted. So, with that in mind, I propose the following slightly tweaked definition of the word “true,” and that definition is, “in accordance with fact or reality, in the present moment.”

Right now, strict capitalists refuse to budge on capitalism. They insist that it works, that it has produced the greatest country in the world, that it has given us better medicine, better modes of transportation, better housing, not to mention computer games and iPhones and virtual girlfriends and WiFi-enabled microwaves and so on, which I agree with to a certain extent, but now, in the year 2026 of our Lord, a check engine light is a catastrophic financial disaster for many people, and those same people can’t even afford to go to the doctor. So, at a certain point, we must be willing to say, “Hey, capitalism has done great things for us in the past, but now we need to shift gears into a different system, at least for the time being, because capitalism is no longer working for us.” This doesn’t mean capitalism is wrong, per se, it’s just not appropriate for the present moment.

But, again, a strict capitalist, someone who believes capitalism is the greatest economic system in the world, would not be open to this change; they would dig in their heels, double down, and rationalize their bullshit in all sorts of ways, because they believe capitalism to be the one true path. We also have this fallacious tendency to assume that if something worked in the past, it must still work today.

This is the problem I have with truth. Per the current definition of “truth,” if something is “true,” it is in accord with “fact and reality,” therefore it cannot be wrong. And we all know people hate to admit when they’re wrong.

So, good news, I have come up with a philosophical framework with which you can never be wrong, or at least that’s the idea. It seeks to remove the shame associated with “being wrong,” instead encouraging one to adapt their beliefs in accordance with the situation, meaning no belief is “right” or “wrong,” just more or less appropriate depending on the circumstances. And I’m calling this philosophical framework “Adaptivism.”

In short, Adaptivism is a pragmatic framework that treats beliefs, values, and practices as tools rather than fixed truths. It advocates selectively adopting elements from any belief system based on their effectiveness in a given situation, with the aim of producing the best possible outcomes. Adaptivism is loosely inspired by the “non-duality” concept found in Buddhism, but it is not beholden to that concept; meaning, in some circumstances, Buddhist ideology may provide the best outcomes for us, but in other circumstances, it might not. Adaptivism does not adhere to any particular belief system; it adheres only to what works at the time. This is the power of Adaptivism: the freedom to choose what you believe without being forced to believe it forever and without feeling shame for having “stopped believing” in whatever previous belief you adhered to. Adaptivism does not care about the “truth value” of any particular belief system, be it religious or philosophical or otherwise, and instead asks, “Will this belief maximize well-being for myself and/or for those around me when considering the present circumstances?”

For example, it’s often said that an atheist in a foxhole will eventually start praying to God to save their life. Now, let’s assume this is true for a moment. If momentarily believing that God exists provides some mental comfort to the foxhole atheist, is his shift in belief systems really so bad? No, I don’t think so. I think the foxhole atheist should do whatever he needs to do in order to soothe his mind. If it works for the foxhole atheist, who am I to judge or care? It’s not like he’s hurting anyone. One may think that the foxhole atheist is a hypocrite, or that he’s fickle, or that he’s unprincipled due to his sudden and possibly temporary shift in belief systems, but an Adaptivist would just describe the foxhole atheist as “open-minded.”

To use the “capitalism” example from earlier, if your society is in the dark ages, needing to foster economic growth and innovation, then perhaps a competition-based capitalist system is appropriate. But, at a certain point, that system must be revised. Capitalism is rooted in this idea that numbers must always go up, that this year’s financial report must be higher than last year’s financial report, even if this year’s goal has been met. Capitalism’s backbone is endless economic growth, but there’s not an infinite supply of resources on Earth, meaning endless economic growth is impossible. It is an unobtainable, self-defeating goal. Thus, capitalism should only be used as a tool to get society to a certain point, then, once that point is reached, that tool should be discarded and replaced with a new, more appropriate tool. We hear all the time how people can’t afford healthcare or fixing their car or even basic groceries. It’s no secret that America’s hardline capitalist system has resulted in extreme income inequality. Capitalism has obviously run its course here. And there are other economic belief systems out there that could solve these problems, like communism or its little brother socialism, yet US policymakers dismiss these systems as impractical or even anti-American because they’ve been indoctrinated into this dualistic idea of “truth” from birth, believing their precious capitalism to be the one true path.

I don’t understand why so many of us think everything has to be so black and white. It’s frustrating. We think that if we change our minds about something, we’re admitting we were wrong, and we don’t like to admit that we were wrong, so we double down, but that doesn’t have to be the case. We have a hard time adapting our beliefs to new information because we get trapped in what I’ll call “truth loops,” where we rigidly believe some dualistic truth, i.e. this thing is better than that thing, and we have a hard time escaping from these truth loops. But the thing is: philosophical, religious, and socioeconomic belief systems are not truths, they’re just ideas, concepts, collections of words and thoughts arranged in different ways. So we’re not betraying our previous beliefs when we change our beliefs, because there’s nothing to betray. It’s all nebulous, metaphysical stuff.

What I’m trying to say is, we are never wrong when we adjust our beliefs to the current situation, we are simply adapting.

That’s why it’s called “Adaptivism.”