The Philosophies Underneath your Relationships

In January, we presented our annual media review where we evaluated the messages in last years most popular movies, shows, music and podcast and saw what they had to say about relationships overall. This month, we’re going to dig deeper and evaluate the philosophical presuppositions that the stories we are taking in are built on. With the ubiquity of smart phones, internet access, streaming services and so many other options for consuming media, we are living in an age when we are able to have a near constant stream of information presented to us in increasingly more creative, engaging and interactive ways. One of the downsides to this fire hydrant of messaging is that, with so much coming at us all at once, it is impossible to think critically about all of these messages, let alone filter out the ones that could be harmful. We’re talking all of it in, wholesale, without recognizing how these messages are shaping our worldviews and, in turn, influencing the choices we make in our lives and relationships.

So, where do we begin? There is so much ground to cover when it comes to the impact of philosophy and individual worldviews on our decision making by itself, but then adding on the layer of how what shows we binge and what music we stream influences those philosophical beliefs is a huge undertaking. There are literally college courses on understanding the philosophies presented by the Beetles, the Grateful Dead, Seinfeld and even the Simpson’s! No joke, actual college courses! Meanwhile, we’re over here trying to break it down for you in a one month series! Where do we even begin? Well, first, let’s build the case for why any of this even matters. While philosophy may seem like one of those high-brow, snobby type things that only the fancy intellectuals can talk about and understand, every one of us actually has a number of fundamental, philosophical beliefs which underpin and direct every choice we make in our day to day lives. Philosophy is really just a fancy word to describe the way that we understand the world, reality or truth. For instance; what stops you from lashing out and becoming violent when someone else upsets you? On the surface, we might answer that it is because we are mature adults and, therefore, are not allowed to behave in such an immature way. While that makes sense on the surface, that’s not actually the deepest reason why we don’t do things like that. Maturity is actually just and outward measuring point of how deeply we have allowed our philosophical beliefs to influence our outward behaviors. When we are consistently living out what it is that we truly believe, we are acting out the maturation of our philosophy. What stops us from becoming violent could really be based on a number of different philosophical notions; we could be a pacifist and believe that violence is truly wrong in all situations, we could be a rationalist and recognize that the legal consequences of that type of violence are not worth the immediate satisfaction of acting out, you could be a Christian and believe in turning the other cheek as a witness to your faith. These are all very different philosophical worldviews which, when lived out in this scenario, produce basically the same immediate outcome. One situation, then, is not usually enough to identify what a person's philosophical worldview is based on, but observation over time can help us to understand which philosophies are driving our lives.

Our actions, our choices, reveal what we truly believe, but what we believe is not always in line with what we know for certain to be true. Here’s an example; deep down you may know that your spouse loves you. You can take that as a fact. The problem is, both of you have been so busy with work, kids, extended family and other obligations that you just haven’t had time for each other for a while so you start to slowly drift apart. After a couple of weeks of hectic life, your spouse surprises you with a date night! That sounds great, but you have had an especially stressful day at work, you’re tired and slightly wounded by the lack of connection, so by the time that you go on the date you don’t even want to be there. You’re irritated, you’re not engaging in conversation and only giving short superficial answers and you just want this night to be over. Your spouse becomes offended, you go to bed that night facing opposites sides and you believe your spouse doesn’t want to be with you anymore. On an intellectual level, you know that is not the truth, but you believe your feelings over your knowledge and your beliefs drive you to become cold towards your spouse as a means of self-preservation – you don’t want to be hurt again so you push them away as a means of making yourself less vulnerable. This is preemptive move on your part based on how you assume they will behave towards you. If this behavior continues, eventually your relationship will become a self-fulfilling prophecy as you keep pushing them further and further away until eventually they stop trying to pursue you. At this point, what you thought you knew – that your spouse loved you – has seemingly been proven false and what your feelings that you placed your belief in are now confirmed. This is an example of a paradigm shift, where our worldviews are challenged, dismantled and a new different worldview takes their place. Paradigm shifts can be good or bad for us. When we shift towards truth, even when the truth is difficult to accept, we are moving more into alignment with reality, and we will experience less inner turmoil. When our paradigm shifts towards a deeper false belief, we may feel a temporary sense of relief as we now have a philosophical worldview which is congruent with our perception of reality, but over time the problems will come back in similar or different ways because our perception of reality is not congruent with actual reality. Living in a way which is not congruent or in alignment with the truth will often produce anxiety, stress, fear, resentment and even depression. On the flipside of that, a paradigm shift – coming to terms with the fact that what you believed, what you thought you knew about a situation, a relationship, or even life itself is actually wrong – is often an extremely stress inducing situation, as well. Many people will retreat back into their worldviews, insulating them with new justifications, new frameworks to explain why things are happening, rather than face the collapse of their paradigm. This can be such a gut-wrenching ordeal that many people would rather avoid it altogether, continuously trying to shore up the walls of their philosophical worldview instead of accepting the truth.

This tendency is described in Romans chapter one, where the apostle Paul describes those who reject the truth of God in order to continue living in sin, “because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator...” v.25 - Earlier, Paul declares that every one of us is without excuse because the invisible attributes or God have been made evident in His creation, meaning that the world has more than enough evidence to convince us that God is real and we are subordinate to Him, it’s just that we willfully suppress the truth in order to avoid the implications of what that truth would mean for our lives. We avoid the paradigm shift that all of reality, all of creation, our lives and everything we hold dear are subordinate to God, that we were made by Him and for Him. That shift can be violent, feeling like a regime change from a maniacal dictatorship that we were in charge of to a new sovereign King, because that is kind of what it is. The difference is that the King has always been the King, we were just living, at times, in blind ignorance and at others willful rebellion to His rule. The call to salvation is actually a call to congruence with reality. As this new worldview begins to take root and mature in us, it begins change our outward behaviors as they conform to our new beliefs. This transition from darkness into light is both immediate and incremental – we were at one moment children of wrath, destined for destruction and the next children of God, recipients of eternal life. On the other hand, we have no clue how deeply rooted our past paradigms have influenced every area of our lives, and we will be spending the rest of our lives weeding out the old thoughts, beliefs and behaviors for new ones which are in line with our new beliefs. This process is called sanctification and it is only possible by the power of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer.