Today I am going to share with you a short piece I wrote almost ten years ago about perception, judgment and rationalization. I wrote it at a time when I had deep thoughts – alas, that period has come and gone. These days responding to my name is about as deep as I get.

I share this today as I am often reminded of how easy it is to get sucked into our own righteousness. Even though I am very conscious of how easily it occurs I still find myself all too susceptible to it. This piece reminds me of the vulnerabilities of being human and fallible.

Don’t get too attached to these deep thoughts…tomorrow I will be back where I belong in the shallow end of the gene pool.

Day twenty of the new forty – obla di obla da

CC

Alone with my thoughts…
(2000)

Here I am again, alone with my thoughts. A frightening proposition really. Even more horrific, to expose your thoughts where others can read them and assess your sanity (or lack thereof). Or perhaps they’ll proclaim your brilliance, the depth of your perception, your uncanny ability to see the world exactly as it is.

Funny thing about perception though, nothing is exact in that realm. Even those things that the individual believes can surely only have one meaning are held suspect to one’s life orientation, present state of mind and the means of presentation. We humans are a complex and varied lot. Our perceptions of what has, is and will happen are so diverse and subject to individual interpretation, that it is a wonder we ever come together about anything at all.

Ah, but come together we do, at least groups of us. It is there, safe and supported in our groups, that we feel free to evaluate, interpret and criticize others’ decisions, actions and lives. Buoyed by numbers we feel free to make judgments based on our own perceptions and those that our group has adopted. There in safety we can attack. We must attack, we rationalize. The ignorance cannot continue unabated.

We are righteous, fueled by our belief that we are right-minded, good, caring people who only want the best for all. The unenlightened must be brought around somehow. Surely they’ll see the truth and value in what we are saying. If they can’t there must be something inherently wrong with their logic. How could they see all the same things we do and come to any other conclusion?

Perhaps they’re defective genetically and their minds are too limited to grasp this concept. Perhaps they are problematic in their vociferous protest to our groups’ ideas. Perhaps their small minds and loud voices are making such an impact that we must spend all our time yelling back. We can not abate the ignorance while we are fighting with the genetically defective. In the interest of enlightenment, we must get rid of the genetically defective. There is no real loss in their removal as they are doomed to live in ignorance and that, as all right-minded thinking people know, is no life at all.

It’s good that we are right-minded, enlightened, good, caring people. Or at least that is how we perceive it.