Don't make Galileo's mistake.
The world revolves around you... or does it?
This is Galileo Galilei. You may have heard of him—a famous Renaissance man and historical figure born 15 February 1564.
You can learn a lot from Galileo, the father of observational astronomy. You can glean lessons in physics and facts about the stars, which is pretty neat, but that’s what Galileo got right. I’m not talking about that today. Today, I’m exploring Galileo Galilei’s mistake—the thing he got wrong—and, well, it’s the mark of a genius like Galileo that the thing he got wrong was actually the thing he got right, too.
The thing he got too right.
Telling people Earth wasn’t the Centre of the Universe.
Let me take you back—the popular view at Galileo’s time was that the universe revolved around a little blue planet called Earth. Galileo discovered this wasn’t true and, being a good little scientist, went to let people know right away.
Unfortunately, poor Galileo faced extreme backlash from fellow astronomers and the Catholic Church. An Inquisition was launched, he was considered ‘vehemently suspect of heresy’ and confined to house arrest for the rest of his life.
He must have been terribly confused. You wouldn’t expect people to react this way. So our planet isn’t the centre of everything… big deal! This information didn’t change the economy, people’s working requirements or living conditions… so, why the big fuss?
As far as I can tell, Galileo’s cosmic calculations were precise to a tee, but he miscalculated society’s tolerance for the truth and factual correctness. Society, it turns out, typically rewards us for being right in the way we’re supposed to be right—getting 19/20 on the English Exam, for example. But when we’re too right, or right in the wrong way, say, telling the teacher the English Exam is arbitrary and pointless, we’re penalised. Adhering to cultural code is normally more important than the truth, perhaps because this is how all truth is determined and governed.
What Galileo violated was not any aspect of material life. Galileo violated something much, much worse—people’s narrative—of themselves. Probably on two levels:
Level of Understanding—Galileo’s account conflicted with the stories in Genesis as well as the idea of anyone being God’s chosen people—how can they be chosen if the planet they live on is not even the centre of the universe?
Level of Consistency—If we’ve believed something for a long time, we prefer to go on believing it. Rearranging our beliefs is hard work, like having to get up from the couch to change the channel. It’s easier to keep playing whatever’s on.
In short, people have something I just thought up called a Belief Stack. Galileo’s wild claims were like a detonator for one of the Foundations of this Belief Stack. And he didn’t even know it. Poor Galileo.
Christian, religious and spiritual people today don’t seem to have much issue with Galileo’s heliocentric model. Belief Stacks can change over time—but they need to be slowly upgraded.
A Belief Stack
This is a belief stack. It has foundations—bottom level beliefs that must remain intact for the higher-up beliefs to hold true.
A Scientific Understanding of the Human Condition
I incite Galileo’s historical calamity today to compare the history of science to our individual lives. Maybe this is a neat analogy, but more likely, each of us is a microcosm of our universe, a small fractal part of the whole that will go on to mirror everything that’s true about the ‘out there’ reality.
Just as society had to embrace the uncomfortable truth that the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, (the shift from geocentrism to heliocentism) each of us has to learn, gradually, that the world doesn’t revolve around us. This is the shift from egocentrism to—well—there’s no centrism word for this (ironically) so let’s just call it Joecentrism.
No, there’s nothing ironic about that.
Before you say, ‘But honestly Joe, I don’t think the world revolves around me,’ let me invoke that dreaded U-word. Unconscious. There it is again—thanks to Freud, we can pin anything you don’t want to admit to to your unconscious.
Really it’s that we don’t remember internalising this belief. It’s not our fault—not initially anyway. Just the consequence of our perspective when we’re infants, pampered by everyone around us, having our every whim catered to and shit literally whiped up for us. It’s easy to assume everything revolves around us.
Theorists say we might even think of ourselves as the same person as our mother and father, until we gradually realise they are ‘independent’ beings from us—at least in the physical sense. The theory kind of fits—it explains our clinginess to our parents, the terrible two’s and impulsiveness of children, the drive to impress or prove parents wrong, and seemingly everything through to the rebellion of teenagers. Adolescence seems to be the time we carve out independence on the most advanced level yet—socially, ideologically, and on the identity level. It’s why teenagers are attracted to means of rebelling against authority figures—it’s rebellion for the sake of proving our difference to and independence from parent figures.
However, this is the trick. As much as developing this sort of authentic independence is a key life pursuit, it’s also the opposite of the point! Alan Watts would say the idea we’re all separate beings from one another and nature is an illusion. Religions like Christianity teach that God is in all things, in fact is everything. Whether religious, spiritual or secular, togetherness and interconnection are easy to read into our universe. So, it all comes full circle.
That’s all we’re doing in this life, learning to find the sun again, playing hide-and-seek with it. Only, it’s not the sun out there… The sun is to the world what your soul is to your life. — Paul Rowse & Joe Wehbe, Holy Sh!t, It’s Only… Tuesday?
Anyway, the philosophical meandering is a little beside the point. The point is we all relapse. Breaking away from the narcissistic, intense egocentrism we start off with in infancy is never clean. We don’t know it, but we go back-and-forth on this belief throughout our lives—it’s hidden in our most intense or emotional reactions to life circumstances, relationships and the treatment we receive.
Some people, though… some people never really make much of a break at all. This is why all the toxic people you know or hear about act as if everything should revolve around them, act like ‘children’ or toddlers (sometimes literally). It’s when the maturation process goes a bit… pear-shaped. More on this topic is explained in my video about Robert Greene’s book, The Laws of Human Nature. For now, I’ll wrap this all up for you in a nice pretty bow:
The moral of this story is that people who feel they’re the centre of the universe, don’t react well to news they are not the centre of the universe.
Unfortunately, this is a lot of people.
So, be careful not to repeat Galileo’s mistake. Learn from the poor man.
😕 Don’t try telling them directly!!
7 Steps to protect you from overly egocentric people
What you want to do is stay away from egocentric people, people who think they’re god’s gift to humanity, think everything should go their way, people who make everything about them and think they have all the answers. This is the method I devised to protect you from these sorts of people:
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