Archive: Actions speak louder than words

First posted 5 May 2005. These days... actions, words, beliefs are all equally 'parts' of what happens. What a person says and does is what the person is. The speaking of the words is just a subset of the actions. The actions owe no consistency to one another, but rather each renders consistency with the moment in which it happens, of which it is a part.

Are a person's actions the true expression of their beliefs? Part of me thinks so. I think the existentialists have a point when they say the real votes are the ones that we make with our feet. If you say you value integrity but routinely tell white lies, then you really don't value integrity (at least as it applies to you). Our actions define us.

Yet I have a couple of doubts. The first one, you might call Catholic. The Catholics (among others) recognise our fundamental human frailty and might say that the white lies in the example above do not speak against the person's values themselves, but rather against the person's discipline and strength in attempting to live by those values. I have a little time for this angle, but not much.

The more significant doubt is based on the unconscious activities of our brains, and it really comes down to the definition of belief. If we define a belief as a wholly conscious mental product, and if we admit that many of the drivers of our actions are sub- or unconscious ones, then we would have to disagree with the existentialists. We believe one thing as conscious beings, but we are not ONLY conscious beings. It is unsurprising that our actions, which have sources outside the conscious realm, do not speak with the same voice as the conscious mind.

On the other hand, if a belief is a mental entity that includes not just conscious components but unconscious ones as well, then I guess we would say that the conscious mental formulation or utterance that we imprecisely call a belief is actually something thinner and less complete than the real belief - just a shadow of a belief. This, I guess, paves the way back to the existentialist conclusion that only the 'whole package' (both conscious and unconscious) as demonstrated through action constitutes the real belief.