The essence of naivete is to default to trust, to trust without thinking. Small children are naive because any random person can walk up to them and tell them something, and the child will believe it.

It is a sign of maturity when a child learns to question, to wonder, when a child knows enough about the world and they know enough about themselves to be able to defy the data you give them. At some point, they say for the first time “That’s wrong.” A mature person can stick their neck out, and claim that they know better what the world is like than you do (or you pretend to).

It is in this moment of maturity that older siblings lose their godlike powers to make younger siblings believe anything. At this point, a child realizes that they know enough that they can get away with not believing you when you say you have eyes in the back of your head, that rain melts people on Friday the 13th, or that there are tigers wandering the streets of town. Before this moment of maturity, a child would believe all this and worse.

It’s a very basic skill, realizing you know enough to have an opinion about something. But there’s something even more basic. There is something holding children back, but it’s not not that they are considering if you are right or wrong, and then they are deciding that they have to believe you because they are too ignorant to have an opinion. No. What’s really making them naive is that it doesn’t occur to them to wonder if you’re right in the first place. They don’t even notice that they automatically believe the ideas that people drop on them; they just believe them without thinking about it.

This is the difference between naive ignorance and mature ignorance. If a physicist is talking to two people and the physicist says that we are all mostly made out of empty space, the naive ignorant person will just unthinkingly believe it. Automatically. And they won’t even notice that they’re doing it.

On the other hand, the mature ignorant person will realize that they have been given a choice; there is a decision for them to make. Unlike the naive person, a mature person will notice that they’re being told to believe something, and they can consciously decide what they are going to do about it. Maybe they throw up their hands and believe the expert, too, but there’s a difference. The difference is that mature people use a 3-step process, and naive people use only a 2-step process.

Mature

Step 1 – Absolutely anybody tells you absolutely anything.

Step 2 – Use your judgment; decide if you think it’s true or not.

Step 3 – Believe or disbelieve based on your analysis.

Naive

Step 1 – Absolutely anybody tells you absolutely anything.

Step 3 – Believe it.

That crucial second step is a mark of maturity. Lacking it is the definition of naivete. The essence of naivete is not realizing you have one very basic power: to think for yourself about whether something is true or a lie.

It’s like a reflex. People yawn when they see other people yawn. You can decide if you want to obey that reflex, but only if you notice it exists. Naive people never notice that they yawn when other people do, so they have no chance to decide if they want to resist that reflex or if they want to go along with it. We are born with a “believe” reflex, and we have no chance to exercise any judgment until we notice we’re acting reflexively. Hence, naivete.

We can remain naive into adulthood, for as long as it takes for us to notice our reflexive gullibility and then decide whether or not to rein it in. If I had to guess, most people figure it out well before their 30’s, though.

However, a very great many people, maybe over half of everybody, stay naive in precisely this same way their entire lives. Except the difference is that we remain naive about…different things. We all learn not to trust absolutely anything anybody tells us, which is great. Even children learn that. What we don’t learn is that we also cannot trust absolutely anything something tells us. I can think of a few examples.

Feelings

Our own feelings. This is made worse by sayings like “trust your feelings” and “follow your heart.” If our feelings say something is true, not only do we believe them, but just like a naive child, we don’t even notice we have that reflex! That’d be great if our feeling were omniscient oracles of pure knowledge, but they’re not.

People with mental disorders of some kind have to face this issue more often that most. Why? Because their feelings are incorrect more often than most. Depending on the mental disorder, your feelings might tell you that people don’t like you, that you’re not worth anything, that the world is ending because of a mistake you made, or that there is danger on every square foot of the planet. So while a child has to learn “Just because someone says something, doesn’t make it so,” someone with a mental disorder has to learn “Just because your feelings say something, doesn’t make it so.”

This is a burden, but it brings with it a subtle advantage. While the rest of us may remain naive about our feelings, since our feelings are right a lot of the time, people with mental disorders know that feelings, like people, are suspect. You wouldn’t believe absolutely anything anybody’s feelings said about you; why would you believe absolutely anything your feelings say about you? Or about anything else.

Thoughts/Sensations

Closely related to feelings or emotions are thoughts. These are more like ideas that just pop into your head: impressions or mental sensations. You might, new on a job, have a sensation of rightness about some piece of work you’ve completed, and hand it in, beaming proudly. Only to be told it’s all wrong, all rubbish, do it again, get it right this time. You would have done better if you had not been naive about the ideas and impressions in your head.

A child learns not to believe just anybody, and those with mental disorders learn not to believe just any feeling. You would have done better if you had learned not to believe just any impression. Especially new on the job, your instincts are suspect. All the more experienced workers know it, and you would do well to learn it, too.

These mental sensations can be mundane or they can be spiritual. A great many spiritual practices have been designed to tap into and create mental sensations. People perform rituals, speak spells, meditate, pray, read tea leaves, use Ouija boards, and so on. Afterwards, they carefully listen, they search inside themselves for mental (or emotional) sensations. In theory, this should be the 3-step process of the mature person, like so:

Step 1 – Find a mental sensation (some way, any way).

Step 2 – Judge for yourself if the mental sensation is true.

Step 3 – Believe or disbelieve based on your judgment.

Instead, as children do with people, and as many of us do with feelings and thoughts, we naively use a 2-step process.

Step 1 – Hear absolutely anything absolutely any sensation says.

Step 3 – Believe it.

Whether it be the word of people, our feelings, or the thoughts in our head, that second step is crucial. It is the mark of maturity and the abandonment of naivete. We have to build it into our way of being, or else exist forever limited by our naivete.

We all reach a kind of maturity when we learn not to believe just anything someone says. This is the end of the first childhood. If we are to be empowered, to forge our way free of the limitations life sets on us, we must achieve an end to a second childhood, and a third. All three kinds of naivete leave us helpless as children. All kinds of naivete blind us in our search for solutions; they encumber the dexterity of our movements, leaving us clumsy and impotent to build a better life for ourselves and others. To think well is to live in a world of opportunities, and the door to such a world has three locks. The end of each era of childish naivete is a key.