The power of Belief 1

There are two things that I want to talk about in terms of the negative power of belief and therefore there will be two separate discussions. It is important that I say that both of these aspects can also be positive in the right dosage (very mild).

They both take different forms and affect different people. Thus, I will focus on possibly the most notable incidences in each case. In this discussion, I will look at the Nazi party nearing the end of WWII. In the next discussion I will look at one facet of the Westboro Baptist C(ult)hurch. (as an aside, written that way you can almost trick yourself into thinking it says Cthulhu)

So firstly, the Nazi party. What did they most notably believe in? The Motherland and the divine strength of the same. Everything else was secondary, which isn't to underplay it, but everything else came from this one core belief. The hatred of the Jewish race, the gypsies and homosexuality came from the belief that this was what was making Germany weak. The love of the aryan 'race' came partly from Neitzche's theory of the Übermensch and partly from the view that this was the purist and therefore strongest race; and so the propagation of this bloodline meant that Germany would strengthen itself through its people.

And how did this play out?
Towards the end of the second world war possibly the most common reaction among the Nazi high command was disbelief - there was no way that they could lose the war and so therefore there was no justification to the claims that they were. Documentation of Hitler's last weeks show that he couldn't accept that there wasn't a way that his men weren't simply lulling the Russians into a false sense of security before crushing them close to Berlin. When they entered Berlin and it became clear that Germany had lost the war, Hitler committed suicide with his wife Eva Braun. Following this the rest of the high command gave up hope - after all, how could they win when their leader had abandoned them and Germany.

So what was the negative power of belief in this case?
Refusing to accept fact over belief. What they 'knew' to be true had lost out to what was actually true but there was no acceptance of this because their belief overrode the facts.

We've seen this in many other cases as well. Possibly the other most well known one was Galileo's fight with the Catholic church over the shape of the earth leading to his conviction for heresy and subsequent house arrest.

So then the question is how negative is this power of belief.
It blinds you to the reality of what is actually happening. This in itself is bad enough, it disallows growth from your accepted beliefs, and as I've stated previously, if you're not growing, you're regressing.
It forces you to lie to yourself by discounting, belittling or misinterpreting data that is true.

Negative indeed.