PARISM

As someone who always struggled to embrace any single school of thought while grappling with meaninglessness growing up, I came closest with existentialism. Even then, it still missed some of the core beliefs I held deep down and developed further in the following years. Because of this, I decided to coin yet another term. Parism, derived from the verb to pare.

Put simply, parism is the idea that human beings should subject their worldview to conscious and rigorous investigation, questioning the beliefs, values, assumptions, and truths they have inherited or developed throughout their lives. This is something I began doing as a kid, especially regarding religious beliefs, and it has become increasingly important in my life.

The purpose of this investigation is not to reach a predetermined universal answer or to replace every belief with a new one. Its true purpose is to arrive at an honest and conscious relationship with what one believes. Parism does not dictate what a person must believe at the end of their investigation. It only determines the importance of the process through which they arrive at those beliefs.

Let's start by defining what I mean by belief in this context. Belief refers to any and all fundamental elements of a person's worldview. It includes anything they deem as true or meaningful that contributes to determining who they are in the world and how they live, such as religious and metaphysical beliefs, moral and ethical values, goals and aspirations, or conceptions of identity.

Most of these beliefs are inherited without us consciously choosing them. We are born into a family, culture, language, society, historical period, and particular circumstances, which Sartre calls our facticity. This facticity leads us to inherit assumptions before we are even capable of recognizing that we are inheriting them, and I will refer to these as our passive inheritance.

Passive inheritance is, then, anything given to an individual by their family, culture, society, education, or any other dimension of their facticity that they hold without having subjected it to sufficient conscious examination and reflective participation, leaving it in the realm of doxa.

This conscious examination is what I am calling paring, the central process through which parism is practiced. To pare means to examine and separate whatever exists within our worldview merely because of inheritance, conditioning, authority, habit, or convenience, until we are left with what we are capable of genuinely, consciously, and authentically sustaining.

Paring means asking, "Why do I believe this?" and continuing to ask until the answer is no longer simply "because I was told" or "because that’s how it has always been," but something you can defend consciously. While paring does not allow us to step outside facticity, it allows us to become conscious of our relationship to it.

Not every belief has to be questioned endlessly, as no human being possesses unlimited time or cognitive capacity. Parism does not require infinite investigation, nor does it demand what a person cannot reasonably and safely examine. The goal is to examine positions as far as you reasonably consider possible, given your abilities, information, and limitations. 

I would say we should subject something to examination proportional to its perceived importance and to the reasons available for supporting it. Once certain fundamental principles have been sufficiently examined, many smaller questions can be evaluated through them. The most demanding part of paring lies in the foundation, and once that foundation has been consciously established, it can serve as a lens through which derived questions are investigated.

It’s also important to note that the parist cannot determine what is important from a neutral position. Our judgment of importance is itself shaped by our experiences, facticity, and values, and it is therefore revisable. We may rely on experts, science, testimony, books, teachers, and traditions. The idea is not to discover everything alone, but to only accept what is intellectually appropriated. You can accept a conclusion if you have examined your reasons for trusting the argument.

Once subjected to investigation, not every inheritance needs to be abandoned either. One possible outcome of paring is the transformation of passive inheritance into what I call conscious inheritance.

A person can be born into a religious tradition, investigate that tradition deeply, and continue to belong to it. In that case, the fact that their religion was inherited does not make their position incompatible with parism. The difference lies in the relationship they have developed with what they received. If they were initially part of the religion because they were born into it, but later investigated its claims and continued to choose it for reasons they consider sufficient, their belief may remain almost identical. Their relationship to that belief, however, will have fundamentally changed.

Through the process of investigation, we may arrive at other positions that were not inherited or simply received from our facticity. These positions can be called conscious acquisitions, meaning those beliefs that we incorporate into our worldview as a result of reflection and deliberate choice.

To recap:

• Passive inheritance: I received it and did not question it.
• Conscious inheritance: I received it, questioned it, and consciously chose to keep it.
• Conscious acquisition: I investigated and consciously incorporated it.

The ultimate purpose of paring is intellectual ownership. A belief does not become truly yours just because it exists inside your mind. It only becomes yours when you can consciously account for its presence within your worldview, all while recognizing that the perspective from which you account for it is itself partly inherited.

To properly claim this intellectual ownership, the concept of authenticity is deeply important to parism. Authenticity, particularly within existentialist traditions, states that one should consciously appropriate and own their choices and values instead of letting expectations, conventions, and inherited roles define them.

To live authentically in the parist sense also involves investigating where the reasons behind the way you live actually came from. For example, a person may feel that they desire something, only to find out that their desire was shaped by values they never fully examined. Paring, then, aims to make that relationship conscious, while recognizing that the act of examination itself happens from within a situated perspective.

Not every human being on Earth is morally obligated to live this way or follow this way of thinking. I do believe, however, that a consciously examined and intellectually appropriated life is preferable to a life built passively upon beliefs that were never questioned.

Living according to unexamined beliefs means living in Sartrean bad faith. It means simply allowing external forces, whether family, culture, tradition, or society, to determine fundamental parts of one’s life without much conscious participation. This allows one's values, goals, beliefs, and sense of identity to be passively received as opposed to consciously created. This is a form of intellectual and existential passivity at best, and at worst, it may lead to deep personal and interpersonal conflicts, much like an unintegrated Jungian shadow.

What parism seeks to overcome is this intellectual passivity, which is a failure in our relationship to our beliefs, and therefore, a failure in our authenticity. The central problem is whether someone maintains a position that they did not make enough effort to investigate.

Because of this focus on the process rather than the result, parism does not regard being wrong, by itself, as the fundamental failure. A person may investigate honestly, consider evidence, evaluate arguments, and arrive at a false conclusion. That is an epistemic error. On the other hand, a person may also arrive at a true conclusion without ever investigating why they believe it. That is not necessarily an intellectual achievement.

An important point I should make is that parism does not contain an ideological conclusion. It does not say that if you question everything, you will discover that we don't have free will, for example. People possess different experiences, abilities, circumstances, and different access to arguments and evidence, so it’s completely natural that sincere investigation will not necessarily produce the same conclusion in every individual. 

The very framework through which people determine what is relevant and persuasive is unique, so one person may end up a collectivist, while another may end up an individualist. The parist legitimacy of a position depends upon its process of investigation and appropriation, not upon an obligation to reach a universally prescribed conclusion.

Paring may sometimes mean arriving at a simple, authentic "I don't know," or what is also called aporia. If a belief cannot be sustained, but no alternative can be sustained with greater confidence, remaining without an answer may be the most honest position available.

In fact, the awareness and acceptance of our ignorance is a big part of the concept. If Socratic ignorance is the conscious awareness of what you personally do not know, I am proposing its cosmic, existential equivalent. I am calling this awareness cosmoignorance, a form of epistemic humility. The understanding that human beings are finite and cognitively limited beings confronting a reality whose scale and complexity may radically exceed their capacity for understanding.

Human beings are, literally and metaphorically, tiny parts of the universe attempting to understand the universe of which they are a part. The fact that intelligence exists does not mean that this intelligence is unlimited, and the potential existence of a fundamental truth does not mean that humans are capable of reaching it.

Cosmoignorance, then, is the permanent awareness that we have no right to presume the human capacity for knowledge is proportional to all that there is to be known. This limitation applies not only to what we know about reality, but also to our awareness of the assumptions and frameworks through which we attempt to know it.

It is not that nothing can be known or that there is no truth. It is simply that our position is always, permanently, the position of a very limited being confronting a reality much greater than itself. Considering this, cosmoignorance should accompany the parist even when they hold strong convictions.

Kantian humility also recognizes the limits imposed on human knowledge by the conditions of our cognition. Cosmoignorance, however, extends this humility into an existential awareness of our position as finite beings within the reality we are attempting to understand. That is, we are not only limited knowers, but small parts of a reality whose scale and complexity may easily exceed our capacity to comprehend it.

Not every investigation needs to have cosmoignorance as its final destination, either. It is more like a permanent epistemological horizon, which includes an awareness of the limits of the perspective from which investigation itself takes place. You can authentically and consciously embrace certain beliefs post-paring, but with the awareness that both the investigation and the conclusions could be terribly limited by your cosmoignorance.

The core idea of parism is that while you have no control over the circumstances you were born into, you are responsible for what you do with them once you are capable of critical thought. You did not choose the foundation of your worldview, but you must eventually examine it and decide whether those inherited values truly reflect who you are.

By questioning your upbringing, you transition from blindly accepting what you were handed to actively choosing your path. Whether you ultimately decide to keep your original beliefs, reject them entirely, or admit you are not sure, any of these conclusions are valid. The only thing that truly matters is that you arrived at your stance through honest, independent investigation rather than passive acceptance.

Parism does not promise absolute truths, a life without contradictions, or a guarantee that two honest people will eventually agree on the same answers. Instead, it is about taking the life and beliefs you were handed and deciding to make them yours on purpose. Question what you have been taught, examine what you currently believe, and let go of whatever you cannot honestly stand behind. It asks you to take your passive inheritances and either transform them into conscious inheritances or replace them entirely with new conscious acquisitions.

When you inevitably hit a wall, when something is just beyond your ability to understand because of our shared cosmoignorance, parism asks you to be brave enough to simply admit you do not know. The point is not to stockpile answers. The goal is to be completely clear on why you hold the beliefs you do, and to be honest about where your understanding stops. At its heart, parism boils down to this: you do not have to have it all figured out, but you are required to look.

According to me. And my facticity. And my cosmoignorance.