This is reminding me of some California prison guards Dave and I met several years ago, they were going to move into the rental unit we were vacating after buying this home. Both on disability (got that? BOTH mother and father on disability, walkin' around just fine though!), two daughters, and the stuff they had to say about the big bad world was awful. I pointed out to them that, as correctional officers, they were really exposed to the dregs of the earth and that, perhaps, their views were skewed. Nope, they knew it all as far as they were concerned. They weren't even letting their girls go to school, homeschooling, 100% under Mom & Dad's disabled watchful eyes.
I mean look, what we're talking about here is just the reality of the world we live in.
People often conceive of the human mind in the following way (especially when summing themselves up):
1.
I have memories.
2.
I have experiences.
3.
I have ideas.
4.
I have beliefs.
5.
I have a problem solving process.
6.
I have behaviors, learned, habitual, and involuntary.
The center is on the self, and the implication is (and the innate belief of many people) that there is some type of central processing unit in your brain that is
*you* and that this CPU essentially parses all the information it gets in the form of memories, experiences, ideas, beliefs, et al. to create your overall personality and provide the context for your decision making.
This is wrong. It is so wrong that it almost doesn't require explanation--but I'll humor you.
The reality is that there is no CPU in the brain. The brain holds on to all of the concepts listed above with a certain all-at-onceness. In a sense, all of those things (and more) from the list above come together in a complex dance with one another--and that just
IS you. Neuroscience has made this very clear to us--and once you hear it, it becomes immediately obvious to you. Why, then, is it that until this point you probably mostly went around thinking of yourself as a CPU, only pausing to think of it this way maybe once or twice in your life?
Because the WAY the brain does this job so flawlessly of tying everything together affords us a PERSPECTIVE which allows us to easily believe that we are a CPU, parsing all of our experiences and making willful choices about each one of them.
This underlines something very important. If your OWN perspective can be off from reality in such a striking way--why do we expect that everyone else's perspective should be spot on all of the time? Why are we surprised when a particular set of experiences, memories, beliefs, and behaviors provides a perspective different from the one which arises from our own personal experiences?
We shouldn't be.
Part of our problem is treating everyone else as though they have not only the same information (as people were arguing about Leonhart above), but also the same PERSPECTIVE as us.
I can flatly guarantee you that Leonhart doesn't believe she is doing evil. Quite the opposite, she likely believes she's doing the absolute best thing she can be doing with her time. With exception given to sociopaths and those with personality disorders--this is how almost EVERY human spends their time, for obvious reasons. It doesn't mean that all people are awesome. Sometimes I wish a car would fall on Leonhart, but that doesn't mean I must choose to willfully misunderstand her or misconstrue her intention.
ALL of us have a personality flaw which disallows us from seeing things outside of our own perspective at times (some more than others)--from understanding that while we may think driving one mile home after a few beers isn't a big deal, someone who lost a child to drunk driving may feel differently. Or when we all see an excellent drug with many medical benefits, others may see the substance their son/daughter first started using when their personality changed as teenagers before they tumbled into a neverending cycle of hardcore drug use. Sure, we know that smoking weed doesn't MAKE you shoot heroin, but to that mother or father those details may be lost. The most important thing to them might be THEIR perspective and NOT YOURS. Those people might just be really pissed and sad that they're losing their children to addiction. They may not have the emotional strength or the time to adjust their perspective as to the hows and whys of how their child got there.
We have all seen this in ourselves, in friends, acquaintances, and loved ones--sometimes that which is obvious is too hard or seems to irrelevant to accept, and it all has to do with perspective.
The one issue I have noticed is common to most of the political zealots on this board is their inability or unwillingness to see things from the perspective of those who oppose them. While this is an excellent policy for shielding yourself from opposition and can bring about many excellent discussions wherein you primarily sit in a circle with a bunch of people who agree with you and high five each other (folks in my generation would call it a circle-jerk)--it does not provide the best results in terms of actually solving the problems that we have.
Our problems in this country will ONLY be solved through compromise. In that way, when you demean your opposition and refuse to see them as the thinking humans they are you do nothing but travel at light speed away from the solution. You also deprive yourself of a clearer picture of REALITY.
It is very nice from the perspective of a pro-legalization anti-DEA activist to pretend that Leonhart is a monster if your goal is only to be *accepted* as having the right argument. Being on the right side. If, however, you want to find truth--you couldn't do a better job of trying to hide from it than to pretend that everyone who disagrees with you must be stupid, evil, or working in a conspiratorial capacity against you or your country.
When that is typed out it seems pretty awful doesn't it? Well, that's what most of our country does every single day. They demonize their opposition because it's easier to lie to themselves than to find common ground and solve tough problems that come along with being in a multinational culture encompassing 7 billion people.
