A lot of what is written and said primarily concerns itself with what people believe in. God, socialism, progress, the almighty dollar. These are all abstractions that many people will gladly throw their lives away chasing and performing deeds in the name of. If we consider the human brain a void which gradually accumulates knowledge with to fill it, we can figure that belief and conviction are like a solid fuel and true-to-fact, verifiable knowledge is liquid, the hypothesis is like a gas.
Unimaginative people cling prefer to the familiar and the repeatable. Flicking a switch will produce light - if darkness persists, we panic. In my home town of Melbourne, Australia the public transportation system is dismal. Trains are routinely delayed. If the trains ran on time, I would figure an uneasiness would grow in commuters due a disruption to their routine of feeling upset at an abstraction. Perhaps divorce rates would soar if the trains ran on time as passengers would have more time at home to complain about their partner instead of to the partner about the tardiness of the train. However, that is not entirely relevant to this post.
If we use our model of belief as solid, we can see that solid objects are immovable and static - they retain the same shape unless they are moved by an external force. If belief occupies the mind of a devout believer, outcomes are more or less repeated. Beliefs about oneself breeds the self-fulfilling prophecy, as Watzlawick posits:
Imagine you think your friends no longer wish to be friendly towards you, the starting point (A). As a result you start to resent them and refuse to take their phone calls and start to spread rumors about them at point (B). Your friends taking affront to your malicious overtures, they stop making phone calls and inviting you to social events (C), which confirms the belief (A). If at Point A a less solid but gaseous hypothesis was given rise at (A) and was allowed to heat up with the fire of action, your friends may confess they have been busy with their own projects or work at (B). With curiosity satiated, the gas condenses as an aqueous true-to-fact knowledge at point (C). The liquid can swirl around one's head, never resting firm and always subject to change as its environment changes. Things look less light they "ought to" and more as they "are" and preferable to one's own person.'A self-fulfilling prophecy is an assumption or prediction that, purely as a result of having been made, cause the expected or predicted event to occur and thus confirms its own "accuracy."'
The solid brain and the liquid brain are almost diametrically opposed to one another, but one can thaw his thinking by realizing that things will never return to "normal" since "normal" does not exist. In constant flux, our bodies and the world around us changes from second to second. It took me, after six or so years of struggling with depression, that "normal" or the routine, comfortable state of being - that of misery, repressed desire and frustration - was all I knew as the correct way. It was never the correct way, but merely a way out of one of multi- or infinitely valued states of existence. The belief projected on to something is the ultimate fallacy that stops us from living fulfilled and happy lives. It all stems from Korzybski's fundamental principle - "whatever you say something is, it is not!" If you ever catch yourself blindly believing, ask your self - how do I know that? The realization will soon enough "click" inside your rapidly thawing head.