Your worldview is the way you make sense of reality. Your worldview determines for you what is right and wrong. At the heart of right and wrong is what is truth. So at the core of your worldview is whether you believe truth is absolute or relative. While truth is perceived fact, absolute truth is independent of perspective. Relative truth would be fact as determined by the individual or situation.
For instance, most people would view gravity as an absolute truth. If you jump off of a building, you will fall to the ground at a speed based on your body weight.
The issue with worldview usually comes with moral or spiritual truths. Facts where the evidence is not seen or observed by human senses and scientific experiments. One such area of truth deals with life and death. Most societies either instinctively or through some religious conviction accept the truth that humans should not willingly take the life of another human. This seems to be an absolute truth until society identifies acceptable exceptions, like capital punishment, war, self defense, euthanasia, and even abortion.
There will be some purists who say truth is absolute and killing is never justified, no matter the situation. However, most societies have justified "killing" for practical reasons in situations where other absolute truths, such as justice, can or must be applied. When there are situations that justifiably alter an "absolute truth", then the door is open for many people to claim truth is relative. This is where worldview becomes complex and divisive. When absolute truth seems to have situations where the truth does not apply, conflicts arise over what is right and what is wrong because exceptions give rise to subjective views from different members of society. The argument for relativism seems to be made stronger. When evidence for truth is not physically seen, then core assumptions influence each individual's position on truth. Core assumptions might be called the view beneath worldview.
I have a friend who is a smart guy and generally economically savvy with his own money. He made the statement that socialism is probably necessary to some point, but not good when taken to an extreme. I was curious so i asked him why he thought this was true? His response, "everyone deserves some basic amount of education, health care, food and housing, etc." His core assumption that "everyone deserves something" was normal for him until I asked him, "why does anyone deserve anything? This means that someone else is forced to provide it to them." He thought a minute and said, "I don't know." Here was a core assumption based on instinctive sense of justice and beyond his awareness, from which all other views of truth about public policy and economics flowed. Seeing that his core assumption was not true changed his understanding on many views of truth in more obvious areas of life.
Your core assumptions are critical to your life's choices for two reasons. One is that all of your streams of consciousness on economics, work, government, family, education and religion flow from your core assumptions. Second, you probably do not even know what your core assumptions are because they exist beneath your normal levels of awareness.
That's why pondering the view beneath your worldview is fascinating and essential....
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