Why do planets all orbit on the same plane in our solar system?
If there's no such thing as up or down in space, why isn't our spiraling planet party more chaotic?
This question is explored in a book I've been working my way through for some time (
Billions and Billions by Carl Sagan). As I was reading it the other night, one part of the story of how we got the answer caught my eye:
"Issac Newton, the mathematical genius who first understood how gravity makes the planets move, was puzzled by the absence of much tilt in the orbital planes of the planets, and deduced that, at the beginning of the Solar System, God must have started the planets out all orbiting in the same plane.
But mathematician Pierre Simon, the Marquis de Laplace, and later celebrated philosopher Immanuel Kant, discovered how it could happen without recourse to divine intervention.
Ironically, they relied on the very laws of physics that Newton had discovered."
Isn't that always the way?
What is wrong with us?
Even when the facts are sitting right in front of us, we don’t see reality clearly. We see it through belief: what we think the world is, who we think we are, what we think other people mean.
I'm not saying these beliefs are inherently bad or should be cast aside without thoughtful reflection.
Beliefs give us hope and definition. They are internal rules we use to decide what’s safe, what’s right, what matters, and how we should show up. And most of them are earned. They are born of tradition, values, and life lessons learned (both the good and the brutal) that shouldn’t be casually dismissed.
But when we hold a belief too tightly, when it hardens into righteousness, our beliefs stop guiding us and start blocking us.
We would never call it that, of course. We call it conviction. We call it values. We call it "just telling the truth" while we quietly stop listening for anything that might change our mind.
Sure, sometimes it is conviction.
Sometimes it is values.
Sometimes it is the truth.
But sometimes it’s something simpler and far less noble, although very human. Sometimes our beliefs are not the result of seeing clearly. They are the result of needing things to be true in a very specific way.
We need the world to make sense. We need our choices to be justified. We need our pain to mean something.
We need a story that feels safe enough to keep us in tact.
Because if a belief changes, something else has to move with it.
A decision. An ideology. A relationship. A self-image.
A plan we’ve built our life around.
And for a lot of us, the cost of that movement feels too high.
So the belief stays, even when reality is scratching at the door, unwilling to let you entirely off the hook. We feel that discomfort, that reality bleeding through the edges of our tightly held beliefs. In response, we clench harder, we close our eyes tighter.
This is where the blinder effect of our beliefs shows up.
We start collecting evidence like a lawyer with an agenda, rather than a scientist in search of truth. We highlight what supports our position and scroll past what complicates it. We reduce people into categories that keep our worldview clean.
Good. Bad. Safe. Dangerous. Smart. Stupid. Enlightened. Confused. Desperate. Hopeless.
Ambiguity is hard and saying "I don’t know" doesn’t feel safe, it feels like free-falling. Because changing your mind can feel like you have to admit you were naive, wrong, foolish, complicit.
But a belief that is never questioned, never challenged, never updated isn’t a belief anymore. It’s an identity. When your beliefs start becoming your identity, your goal becomes self-defense and protection at all costs.
The truth is like wealth: it doesn't scream, it whispers.
Righteousness, on the other hand, has heat, speed, and momentum. It possesses a need to win so it doesn’t ask, "What’s real?” It asks, "How do I prove I’m right."
That’s why our belief-born blinders are so seductive and effective.
They don’t feel like denial, they feel like stability, responsibility, standards.
They are also usually born from your best traits.
Your desire to be principled, consistent, honor what you’ve learned, and protect yourself from repeating old patterns and mistakes. All of these are good instincts. But there is a fine line between beliefs that are good guardrails and those that become impenetrable walls.
There's nothing wrong with having an identity built on a set of beliefs.
But you've got a big problem when your identity becomes a sacred object instead of a working model that can be adapted through exposure to new experiences and information.
